4 ms·

> How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? Perhaps by not "ins

by RunSet 4y ago

> How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? Perhaps by not "instantly" displaying the document- that is, displaying it before you are able to display its scrollbar.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Scrollbars can be dynamically updated as the content is processed. This is also a distinct advantage of a proportional sized scollbar elevator like those in Windows since the elevator shrinks to its final size rather then starting at a small fixed size and shifting around.
9dev 4y ago
But why on earth would I want to wait for a document to open, just so the height of the scrollbar is accurate when I see it first..? That is such a minor detail when viewing a document. Maybe the metaphor of the scrollbar is just a bad one?
- plugin-baby 4y ago
  Or just imperfect, but often useful?
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    Imperfection (or non-universal applicability) isn’t the problem, absence of a graceful fallback when it hits is.
mananaysiempre 4y ago
That seems silly as well, doesn’t it? Why should I wait for all the 1030 pages and 155 MB of Matter and Interactions[1] or 1442 pages and 126 MB of Life[2] to load before I can do anything with it? (Not that a hundred meg should take that much time to load, but then you realize PDF is the moral equivalent of a bunch of gzipped JSON files pointing to each other...) It would be handy if PDFs included an index of all page sizes in a single place, but they don’t, so we need to make do with what they do include somehow. [1] https://matterandinteractions.org/ https://matterandinteractions.org/ [2] https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Life-The-Science-of-Biology/p/1319017649 https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Life-Th...
Waterluvian 4y ago
Could someone remind me what the name is for the eternal debate between the two valid camps: “HTML should never ever render if there’s an error” vs. “Renderer should try its best to render part of a document if there’s errors” ? I feel that this is akin to that. I strongly believe both perspectives are valid for often overlapping contexts.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  Draconian error handling vs Postel’s law? Both behaviours are still in browsers for XHTML (and XML+XSLT) resp. HTML (though the removal of <noscript> in XHTML5 makes me sad).

by RunSet 4y ago

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

Scrollbars can be dynamically updated as the content is processed. This is also a distinct advantage of a proportional sized scollbar elevator like those in Windows since the elevator shrinks to its final size rather then starting at a small fixed size and shifting around.

9dev 4y ago

But why on earth would I want to wait for a document to open, just so the height of the scrollbar is accurate when I see it first..? That is such a minor detail when viewing a document. Maybe the metaphor of the scrollbar is just a bad one?

plugin-baby 4y ago
Or just imperfect, but often useful?
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  Imperfection (or non-universal applicability) isn’t the problem, absence of a graceful fallback when it hits is.

mananaysiempre 4y ago

That seems silly as well, doesn’t it? Why should I wait for all the 1030 pages and 155 MB of Matter and Interactions[1] or 1442 pages and 126 MB of Life[2] to load before I can do anything with it? (Not that a hundred meg should take that much time to load, but then you realize PDF is the moral equivalent of a bunch of gzipped JSON files pointing to each other...) It would be handy if PDFs included an index of all page sizes in a single place, but they don’t, so we need to make do with what they do include somehow. [1] https://matterandinteractions.org/ https://matterandinteractions.org/ [2] https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Life-The-Science-of-Biology/p/1319017649 https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Life-Th...

Waterluvian 4y ago

Could someone remind me what the name is for the eternal debate between the two valid camps: “HTML should never ever render if there’s an error” vs. “Renderer should try its best to render part of a document if there’s errors” ? I feel that this is akin to that. I strongly believe both perspectives are valid for often overlapping contexts.

mananaysiempre 4y ago
Draconian error handling vs Postel’s law? Both behaviours are still in browsers for XHTML (and XML+XSLT) resp. HTML (though the removal of <noscript> in XHTML5 makes me sad).