{"id":170,"date":"2011-07-10T04:44:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-10T04:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/?p=170"},"modified":"2021-11-17T11:21:24","modified_gmt":"2021-11-17T11:21:24","slug":"scrollbars-what-we-lost-in-technology-deevolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/?p=170","title":{"rendered":"Scrollbars – what we lost in technology (de)evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

I while ago I wrote about scrollbars and their positions on the right and on the left<\/a> of the applications windows. I won’t go into details whether left\/right is wrong\/right (more about arguments can be found in the mentioned post). I recently read about what we lost in scrollbars<\/strong> in an article about what we lost in the technology evolution<\/a> (or as the authors name it de-evolution). An worthy mentioned example are "clicky" keyboards such us IBM Model M. <\/p>\n

Bill Cattey argues that today’s scrollbars are too simple<\/strong>: <\/p>\n

"I’m disappointed in the direction scrollbar behavior has evolved,"
\nCattey laments. "In the early days of user interface toolkits<\/strong> (think
\nback to the X Window system, Sun Open Look and the CMU Andrew Toolkit of
\n the early 1980s), Windows, MacOS, and UNIX Workstation platforms
\nexplored many possible aspects to scrollbar action beyond just dragging
\nthe bar to move the text<\/strong>."<\/em> <\/p>\n

"The CMU Andrew Toolkit<\/strong> had very complex scrollbars that took a while
\n to master," say Cattey. "Once mastered, they provided <\/strong>two features I
\nmiss very much: left-click to bring this line to the top of the window
\nand right-click to bring the top line of the window down to here<\/strong>. I
\ncould comfortably read online documents by paragraphs and other logical
\ngroupings <\/strong>by positioning the mouse appropriately in the scrollbar and
\ndoing a quick left-click or right click. It quickly became a habit that
\n required no thought."<\/em><\/p>\n

This complex scrollbar behavior "looked like it was becoming
\naccepted," according to Cattey. "I remember being pleasantly surprised
\nto find it available in Emacs<\/strong> built against the Athena Widgets. It was
\nthere for a while, but then it was gone. The more popular Mac and
\nWindows platforms evolved very different ideas about whether to offer
\nthe ability to support a right mouse button, and what behavior it should
\n have. Scrollbars got simpler.<\/strong> Too simple for my tastes."<\/em><\/p>\n

"To this day," says Cattey, "Whenever I read an article online, be it
\n in Adobe Reader, a text editor, or a web browser, I try to get an
\nuninterrupted paragraph on the screen, fail, curse, and move on, knowing
\n that online reading used to be a far less turbulent and far more
\ngraceful experience before popular and simple displaced complex and
\nuseful<\/strong>."<\/em><\/p>\n

Before there were scrollbars, command-line interfaces to Unix and DOS
\n would paginate output and pause when the screen was full<\/strong>, until you
\nrequested the next screenful with the "more" command — which required
\nbeing included in the command line, e.g., "grep fnord * | more" ("search
\n for the character string ‘fnord’ in all files in the current directory,
\n and pipe the output through ‘more’).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Interesting enough. No mentioning of left\/right but worrying about simplification of scrollbars<\/strong>. Some screenshot and scrollbars behaviours can be found in already mentioned post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I while ago I wrote about scrollbars and their positions on the right and on the left of the applications windows. I won’t go into details whether left\/right is wrong\/right (more about arguments can be found in the mentioned post). I recently read about what we lost in scrollbars in an article about what we...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-8-software-interfaces"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":801,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}