Opera Proposes Switching Browser Scrolling For 'Pages'

Barence writes "Opera has proposed a new browsing system that swaps scrolling on websites for flippable pages. The Norwegian browser maker is looking to remove the side scroll bar for documents or articles in favor of 'pages' of a set-size, similar to an ebook. Text can be reflowed into a column layout, and ads will be moved into the right spot in the text, with different ones displayed depending on the orientation of the device. Pages are flipped with gestures on tablets or with mouse clicks on the desktop. It's an 'opportunity to rethink the ads on the web and the user interface,' said Hakon Wium Lie, Opera's CTO." Their main focus for this is browsing on tablets.

Comments

Sounds interesting

[rhyder128k]

The only problem with Opera innovating is that, if an new idea works out, the other browsers will add it. The only alternative is if Opera can patent the ideas. Not something that would prove very popular 'round here.

Re:Sounds interesting

[locopuyo]

Opera isn't that kind of company. If Opera patented all their ideas web browsers would be stuck in 1999.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Local ID10T]

The only problem with Opera innovating is that, if an new idea works out, the other browsers will add it..

That is not a problem, that is a GOOD THING.

Re:Sounds interesting

[tsa]

I don't see your problem. Luckily Opera can not patent their brilliant idea anymore because they threw it out in the open already. So bring it on everybodyl

Re:Sounds interesting

[jd]

There's prior art. Page-based documents created via a markup language which supports hypertext linking have been around for a while.

But, then, I like the hyperref package for LaTeX.

Frankly, I'd rather see LaTeX as a language extension. That way, you could have the page itself specify if it's to be paginated or scrolled, and if paginated how those pages should be constructed. The syntax already exists, the parser is nearly bullet-proof (more than could be said of most browsers) and those who actually want such a format (ie: people writing books, papers, etc) are likely the ones who already know the LaTeX language.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Forbman]

Actually, it's not. Go to a web site (tom's hardware, Wired, etc), where their long-content articles are broken up into "pages".

And then read the comments, at least on Wired, where 90% of them are bitching about how there's not a "view all" option.

maybe a different gesture to scroll one page at a time is what is really needed on tablets/smartphones, but that should really be the milleau of the tablet OS, not HTML 5 or the browser, because it would probably be useful in more than just a web browser on these platforms.

Re:Sounds interesting

[sodul]

I'm not seeing a huge improvement over the Reader button in Safari ... which hides all the non article content btw (including ads). Scroll by page ? I would not like it personally since this is an artificial constraint from the legacy paper based medium. Having a maximum number of word letters for the width of the text is a natural constraint: your brain is more efficient than with very very large lines of text. This is why I keep my code under 100 chars width btw.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing to have everybody copying Opera even though we don't use Opera because we don't like it?

Firefox already suffers from an inferiority complex with regards to Chrome, and feels as though it must copy every annoying aspect of Chrome until there's nothing to differentiate the two. Once functionality of my favorite extensions is available in another browser I'm going to ditch FF like nobody's business. It's like IE vs. Netscape all over again, but now it's FF that's got people itching to leave.

Re:Sounds interesting

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeah we're seeing a lot more of that now that FireFox isn't so fanboy'licious anymore.

Re:Sounds interesting

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Not necessarily. They'd either have to license it (bonus to the inventors, that'll get them to spend even more time on R&D ) or they'd have to come up with their own alternatives. Those alternatives are how innovation starts. Maybe Pages aren't good enough, maybe auto-scrolling is even better. In that effort to get around that patent, we'd find out, instead of becoming complacent and settling for poor carbon copies of features.

Nobody here is going to like what I'm saying, and I'm cool with that. All I can say to that is at least with the patent approach they'd have to detail every little aspect that makes it work. If software patents only lasted a year or so, that'd be pretty bad ass all around.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Rary]

Actually, what you're describing about Tom's or Wired is exactly why this would be a good idea.

A website can split a document across multiple pages if they want to. But to do that, they're actually creating multiple documents. What Opera seems to be proposing is the idea that a single document could be rendered as a multi-page document. In other words, it's up to the browser to render it as multiple pages.

So, why is that a good idea? Because, if it's up to the browser to render a single document in multiple pages, then the browser could also choose not to render that document in multiple pages. The decision of how to view the document lies on the client side, not the server side.

So, instead of complaining about not having a "view all" option, those commenters would simply select the "view as single page" option in their browser and be happy.

Re:Sounds interesting

[PopeRatzo]

It is nice to see credit where credit is do. Opera constantly innovates while other take with no recognition.

Opera's getting it's recognition right here.

Ideas are not property, except by government fiat. Strange that all these Randian libertarians believe government should give special protection to people who have a good idea but fail to make money with it. How do we know they wouldn't make more money if they didn't have such special protection? How do we know it wouldn't spur greater innovation if there was no such thing as "intellectual property"?

Re:Sounds interesting

[AnonGCB]

Not sure about the randian part, but as a regular old libertarian (or anarcho capitalist, anyway) IP is stupid.

Re:Sounds interesting

[gandhi_2]

Having paper rolled up in a "scroll" is an even older paper-based medium.

Personally, I don't know what the problem here is. There are "page"-down buttons, and web "pages" have always had the ability to break content into multiple pages with links.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

bonus to the inventors, that'll get them to spend even more time on R&D

No, bonus to the middlemen (e.g. lawyers) and managers. The reality, not the fiction that you're spouting, is that inventors are rarely rewarded. Look it up. Not tp mention the enormous financial load to society that are patents.

In that effort to get around that patent, we'd find out, instead of becoming complacent and settling for poor carbon copies of features.

No, people still compete. Removing patents doesn't stop that. On the other hand patents do stop competition. By definition; they're a monopoly. Whose to say somebody else wouldn't have a much better implementation of the patent's ideas?

Those alternatives are how innovation starts.

No, completely arbitrary similarities and differences as defined by ivory towered PTO bureaucrats do not constitute innovation.

People copying, using, learning, improving and competing is what true innovation is all about. Almost always incremental.

All I can say to that is at least with the patent approach they'd have to detail every little aspect that makes it work.

With just the tiny little downside, hardly worth mentioning, of blocking billions from using an idea just so one person can have increased profit from an idea that was probably going to be independently rediscovered many times anyway.

Engineers are specifically advised not to read patents in case it increases damages. What's the point in reading a patent if it's almost all downside?

Re:Sounds interesting

[theshowmecanuck]

Exactly. I know when I have to read PDF documents, I always switch to 'scroll pages' rather than have them pop through page by page, almost exactly the same way that flipping pages would be. Scrolling through content is a more natural way to read it, in my opinion.

Re:Sounds interesting

[mattr]

You mean like Vadim Lopatin's GPL Cool Reader does for RTF files on Android? Extremely useful app. Market link. It even keeps track of what page you were on last time you read the file. By the way I downloaded Opera for Android but Android's built in browser also adjusts the divs to make one column. Reflowing layout is what HTML is supposed to be about. I don't get where there is a need to patent this at all. Obvious software is obvious.

Re:Sounds interesting

[dgatwood]

Speaking as someone who has spent countless hours writing custom LaTeX macros, bulletproof is exactly the opposite of the word I'd use for LaTeX. As soon as you stray very far at all from academic papers, it suddenly becomes just about the most fragile piece of code I've ever worked with. It's great as long as you never have to do anything custom. As soon as you say the words, "I know. I'll write a custom macro to [...]," you've just crossed the line into despair territory.

To put it in perspective, my novel formatting code is 1545 lines, about half of which are insanely complex TeX macros, versus under 500 lines of CSS that does about 90% of the same stuff (minus the crop marks and page margin bits).

In fact, given what modern browsers are capable of in terms of typesetting, I'd imagine it would be just a few thousand lines of JavaScript to produce a much more fully capable typesetting engine than all of LaTeX put together, but with a lot fewer limitations. For example:

• It took 28 lines of LaTeX code to emulate the interaction between the CSS min-width and width properties on a div. (The min-height property, by contrast, took only one line of TeX, which may explain why I found a dozen sites that explained min-height, but no ready-made solutions for min-width.)
• LaTeX is really, really bad at math. You have to know how to write your own macros just to subtract one length from another. I'd estimate 75% of the macros I've written have required getting the floating point package involved, which is just a royal pain.
• There are three different ways to center. Not all of them ignore the first paragraph indent like you'd expect. So if you're wondering why your centered text is shifted off to the right....
• LaTeX mixes code (macros) with text freely (without any delimiters), which means it is often difficult to write macros that are easily readable without adding extraneous whitespace in the output.
• LaTeX doesn't have any real notion of floating content on its own, so if you add a drop cap and the paragraph in one chapter happens to be only a single line long, you get to fix it by hand or write some insane code using the FP package calculating the vertical distance between the drop cap marker and the first line of the next paragraph to see if it is greater than one line long. That's almost a hundred lines of code right there, versus something like three lines of CSS.
• LaTeX really doesn't have a very good way to say that the end-of-section marker must be on the same page as at least two lines of the previous paragraph, but that it need not be on the same page as the entire paragraph. In HTML, it's just style="page-break-before: never;" and you're done.
• There seem to be a thousand different ways to tweak page margins, none of which are universally compatible with various other packages (headers, footers, and other stuff done during the AddToShipoutPicture phase, in particular, if memory serves).
• The user community has all sorts of hacks to work around various aspects of LaTeX's design, but these often interact in strange and almost inexplicable ways when you combine them. What makes this particularly problematic is that most of the maintained macro packages aren't much better in this regard. This is actually fairly fundamental in the design; macros are inherently much harder to write than normal procedural code that operates on attributed data like the DOM.
• There's something fundamentally bizarre about a typesetter that doesn't know where it just put content, forcing you to add a bookmark and write it into a file, then find out the value on the next pass. Compared with the JavaScript DOM, that's amazingly clumsy.
• God help you if you want to do something simple like programmatically redefine boldface to a squiggly underline in a way that is actually robust. In particular, I had endless trouble with the interaction of uwave and/or textbf and other macros causing all sorts of errors whose explanations had absolutely nothi

Re:Sounds interesting

[dgatwood]

The book replaced the scroll because you could pack a lot more density into something when you have sheets stacked on top of one another instead of wrapped into a tube. That benefit outweighed the inconvenience of having to reset your brain every time you turned the page. However, the point still remains that when you are actually reading the content, it's much easier to read a continuous scroll because you never have to think, "Oh, crap, how did the last page end again?" and flip back.

With software, you don't get higher content density by dividing things up into pages (higher ad density notwithstanding). There are basically only two good reasons to have page-based content in browsers: to format content for printing, and to provide an easy way to mentally bookmark where you are in a book and/or provide citations (go look at paragraph 3 on page 212). Neither of these requires viewing the content a page at a time, however; you could insert a light horizontal rule with a small margin around it and a page number off at one edge, and this would provide the same benefit without interrupting the reading process.

Thus, in my mind, viewing content a page/screenful at a time seems like a tremendous step backwards. It's an unnecessary change that provides no benefit and makes reading clumsier.

Re:Sounds interesting

[NightWhistler]

I was a surprised to see this article, since I also dislike page flipping.

I read a lot of books on my tablet, but one of the first things I looked for was an e-book reader that would allow me to just seamlessly scroll through the book instead of emulating page-turns.

To me having to turn pages was an artifact of paper books... a useful one because it allowed for fast indexing, but since e-books are searchable and support links it's no longer needed. I find it's less straining to my eyes if I don't have to keep jumping from the bottom of the page back to the top, but can just move the text into the 'sweet spot'.

Re:Sounds interesting

[beelsebob]

Yeh... Because people round here don't think software patents are bad because they stop other people from using the cool idea.

Don't be so hypocritical, stopping other people using the cool idea doesn't suddenly become good because you like the company.

Re:Sounds interesting

[beelsebob]

You mean like Safari has in "reader"? Damn, wish someone thought of that.

In the mean time – I don't see why anyone thinks this is a good thing, multitouch on a tablet showed us one thing... how awesome scrolling is if you can throw the document and tap to stop it. Why would you break that by making the user repeatedly make a gesture?

Re:Sounds interesting

[beelsebob]

Notably, Safari's reader feature deals with this, and loads up all the pages into one.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Samantha Wright]

We're pretty off-topic here, but history answers both questions: profit margin is inversely proportional to rate of innovation. Developing new products, whether they're inventions, movies, or plays, costs money and crowds out the market for their predecessors, often even when they're not in direct competition. Low IP protection permits rapid development of incremental changes (guess how many adaptations of Romeo and Juliet were made before Shakespeare did his?) but reduces the incentive to invent radically new things (one of the arguments for why IP law can spur innovation.)

However, if we want to think about this as adults? No one knows if IP is right, because no one has done a study, because you can't really measure progress—especially when the current system is definitely broken as designed, and doesn't reflect a healthy IP ecosystem.

Re:Sounds interesting

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

No, people still compete. Removing patents doesn't stop that.

Who pays for the resources and the patent?

Re:Sounds interesting

[ultranova]

Frankly, I'd rather see LaTeX as a language extension. That way, you could have the page itself specify if it's to be paginated or scrolled, and if paginated how those pages should be constructed. The syntax already exists, the parser is nearly bullet-proof (more than could be said of most browsers) and those who actually want such a format (ie: people writing books, papers, etc) are likely the ones who already know the LaTeX language.

The problem with this is... Web is not paper. You are not printing out A4s, you are rendering to my display. I always want everything in a single scrolled page with no margins. If I see something that's broken into 20+ pages, I'll just close the browser window/tab.

Content and presentation both matter, but the user should always be the final arbiter in representation.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Pieroxy]

IP is stupid.

The quote of the day.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Pieroxy]

No, people still compete. Removing patents doesn't stop that.

Who pays for the resources and the patent?

Hmmm, people that want to sell a superior product?

Re:Sounds interesting

[m50d]

The problem is that there's no incentive for any other browser to innovate when they can just wait and copy Opera. And they don't.

Re:Sounds interesting

[serviscope_minor]

I agree with what you say, but only uup to a point. TeX itself is a very low level system as you probablyu know having programmed it. I agree that the programming language is nasty and has some astonishing warts, and there are problems with package compatibility.

However, what you are claiming is not entirely fair. If it's built into CSS then it is almost certainly easier in CSS than in TeX. The point is that due to the capabilities of TeX, you can do things that the CSS designers never thought of (like those crop margins).

I (personally) make heavy use of custom macros. They tend to be rather simple things to eliminate common sub expressions, or set up things in various ways, often programatically, which is the real advantage of TeX.

Of course, my skills are limited and bodgy because I don't really understand the TeX system or macro language properly. I should really read the TeX book when I have time (ha ha).

Part of the interaction problem you describe is very much a LaTeX2e problem, rather than a TeX problem per-se. It's all supposed to be solved in LaTeX3, which indicates that it may be solvable, but given the gestation period of LaTeX 3, I am a bit suspicious. There are also other macro packages like ConText, but of course one already knows Latex.

Probably the most interesting development is LuaTex which embeds a Lua interpreter and gives it full access to the TeX internals. This will allow one to switch out to a non-escaped programming environment where one can use a sane environment without adding whitespace in weird places. Apparently CoNTeXt already uses this, but I don't believe that the pdflatex, XeTeX and LuaTex features have all been merged yet.

I know what you mean about whitespacer though. It's deeply annoying when your macro doesn't even have any whitespace in it, but it inserts an empty non-space box somehow, so TeX decides to put space around it anyway.

Btw: there is a macro package for LaTeX which allows you to do sane arithmetic in setlength commands, though I can't remember the name of it.

But anyway, the conclusion is that CSS is higher level and makes anything that fits its model easy. However, many htings are simply impossible in CSS.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Hognoxious]

Luckily Opera can not patent their brilliant idea anymore because they threw it out in the open already.

They can't patent their brilliant idea because it's only an idea, not an invention.

At least, by the letter of the law...

Re:Sounds interesting

[xaxa]

Opera already supports a full-screen presentation/projection mode, as defined by CSS (2?). See this example, then press F11 to go full-screen. The content is split into screens/pages, use Page Down to go to the next one.

Except in demonstrations of CSS, I've only once seen this used.

(more details)

Re:Sounds interesting

[hvm2hvm]

Yep, what's wrong with page up/page down? If the text is properly formatted into paragraphs it should work just as a specially made page-centric site.

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

Yes!
If you think that having tabs, tab groups, sidebars, user scripts, encoded password managers... (the list goes on) sucks then yes send one back! ;-)

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

However, if we want to think about this as adults? No one knows if IP is right, because no one has done a study, because you can't really measure progress—especially when the current system is definitely broken as designed, and doesn't reflect a healthy IP ecosystem.

Very true. But that problem would fix itself if You killed all the Economists/Accountants/Economic_Theorists/Money_Brokers/you_get_the_idea...

Didn't get it? ok, let me explain: The IP and Patent eco system of the world degraded into a corpolegislative mess the second we gave the above guys the keys to the garage. Just like with the monetary system they went in, turned everything into a tradeable good and went berserk with it. Now it is out there in plain sight for everyone: the Money sciences have failed as have the IP and © sciences. But what would happen if IP and © Where to be immutably attached to the person(s) who produced them? then you would be facing a totally different ecosystem, one that would protect the inovator and not the sponsoring company, fixing every problem there exist about patent trolls and similar.

Re:Sounds interesting

[DarkOx]

Rand essentially sought to combine Ethical Egoist philosophy with anarchic capitalism. You can certainly be one without being the other and the former does not clearly apply here.

Re:Sounds interesting

[vlm]

The only alternative is if Opera can patent the ideas.

What about the kindle? Their "invention" is basically the kindle experimental web browser. Pull up /., use the side buttons to scroll thru distinct pages... I've seen it demoed but not used it.

Basically its a e-ink simulator for LCD screens.

Note that I'm a "page up page down" reader. smooth scrolling extensively on a ipad makes me literally seasick because everything in my field of vision is moving but my inner ear disagrees. I would love a "page up page down" button for an ipad. Supposedly flicking the screen works ... about 60% of the time... too frustrating to use.

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

And who would want that then?
</sarcasm>

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

never again has a sig been that misleading!

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

Well, AFAIK Opera's busyness plan is mainly based on sponsor contributions for things like default search etc. (thankfully) So unless they put a bean counter on the head of the board I would suggest browser innovation is safe as far as it concerns Opera.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Smallpond]

Who would pay for expensive new inventions if patents weren't assigned to a company? And if the company can't sell its patents, then there wold just be a new company created with every patent and they would just sell the company. There's a way around every restriction when you try hard enough.

Besides, there's no point in patenting web technology. If it only works in one browser, then web sites won't use it. They were already burned by IE-only stuff in the past. How many people here have had to fix a website that some clod put up using Active-X crap?

Re:Sounds interesting

[GameboyRMH]

Generally yes it's a good thing, but I'm not so sure about this particular case...

They shouldn't copy the Emperor's fashion if he's wearing no clothes. It's that kind of thinking that made other car designers want to copy Chris Bangle.

Re:Sounds interesting

[tehcyder]

"Anarcho-capitalist" is a contradiction in terms, unless you have no idea what anarchism means.

The power structures necessary for capitalism to exist are in direct contradiction to the essentials of anarchist philosophy. By definition, in a system where money is power, people will be able to exert power over others through control of capital.

Anarchism is a noble dream, albeit plagued with problems in large scale reality, but "anarcho-capitalism" is just an American excuse to remove the few checks and balances that progressive politics has managed to impose on pure capitalism through democratic means..

Re:Sounds interesting

[tehcyder]

No, people still compete. Removing patents doesn't stop that. On the other hand patents do stop competition. By definition; they're a monopoly. Whose to say somebody else wouldn't have a much better implementation of the patent's ideas?

You can't patent ideas, only specific implementations of them, so any magically simultaneous implementation couldn't be any better, or else it would be patentable itself.

Re:Sounds interesting

[tehcyder]

I thought one of slashdot's unwritten laws was that you weren't allowed to criticise LaTex any more than you were allowed to describe Microsoft Word as being a perfectly adequate word processor?

Re:Sounds interesting

[tehcyder]

1. No one with any choice in the matter uses Safari.

2. Scrolling on tablets is rubbish..

3. No I don't have an iPad.

Re:Sounds interesting

[tehcyder]

I was a surprised to see this article, since I also dislike page flipping.

I read a lot of books on my tablet, but one of the first things I looked for was an e-book reader that would allow me to just seamlessly scroll through the book instead of emulating page-turns.

To me having to turn pages was an artifact of paper books... a useful one because it allowed for fast indexing, but since e-books are searchable and support links it's no longer needed. I find it's less straining to my eyes if I don't have to keep jumping from the bottom of the page back to the top, but can just move the text into the 'sweet spot'.

Some of us who don't read one word at a time with our lips moving find it very hard to speed read scrolling text. Maybe it's just technique/practise, but I find the boundaries of a page much easier to cope with than an endlessly scrolling page.

Re:Sounds interesting

[s_p_oneil]

Actually, there are quite a few more problems with this idea. If the masses love it but the brighter people don't, we could be stuck with it on all browsers. To make matters worse, a change like this would require web developers everywhere to test all their web pages both ways (paged and scrolling) to make sure page breaks don't come at the wrong place. And of course, Microsoft, Firefox, Chrome, etc. won't implement their "paging" the same way, causing web developers to have to test everything 8 different ways instead of 4. Do we allow web developers to add their own page breaks? What if they do and it looks great on IE but formatting differences cause it to break at the top of the page on other browsers? What if you have linked JavaScript controls that end up being on different pages?

Re:Sounds interesting

[tehcyder]

The book replaced the scroll because you could pack a lot more density into something when you have sheets stacked on top of one another instead of wrapped into a tube. That benefit outweighed the inconvenience of having to reset your brain every time you turned the page. However, the point still remains that when you are actually reading the content, it's much easier to read a continuous scroll because you never have to think, "Oh, crap, how did the last page end again?" and flip back.

If you have to reset your brain when you turn a page, and can't remember for the fraction of a secondit takes how the last page ended, I can only suppose you don't read much for pleasure.

Re:Sounds interesting

[sorak]

Why would you break that by making the user repeatedly make a gesture?

Every time I have to use Safari, I repeatedly make a gesture.

Re:Sounds interesting

[PopeRatzo]

Who would pay for expensive new inventions if patents weren't assigned to a company?

The same people who always pay for them: consumers.

Re:Sounds interesting

[kiwix]

In fact, given what modern browsers are capable of in terms of typesetting

What browser are you using?

My browser doesn't do hyphenation or ligatures, the kerning is probably rather bad, and I don't think that the line breaking algorithm is as good as the one in TeX. Moreover, there is no reasonable way to set the line length (half of the websites use a very small column, and the other half use the full window width which is generally too wide), and making a table of content is a pain in the ass.

And to answer a specific claims:

LaTeX really doesn't have a very good way to say that the end-of-section marker must be on the same page as at least two lines of the previous paragraph

I't called a widow, and you can prevent them with \widowpenalty=10000. By default, they are only discouraged because sometimes they look less ugly that the other alternatives.

Re:Sounds interesting

[BitZtream]

Nor did they invent side bars, user scripts, or encoded password managers.

All of those things were around before Opera the browser or the company existed.

Re:Sounds interesting

[BitZtream]

I should also point out, they haven't 'invented' page flipping on pages either. Several websites I've visited either do it now or have done it in the past.

The end result is that the website gets redesigned because while we had to do side scrolling with books, turns out people find it rather obnoxious when the other choice is vertical scrolling.

The smart websites that used horizontal scrolling ... did it in the past ... and not for very long till they switched back to something normal.

Re:Sounds interesting

[BitZtream]

It's like IE vs. Netscape all over again, but now it's FF that's got people itching to leave.

So its EXACTLY like IE vs Netscape again.

IE does a little bit of catching up, and the Netscape crew runs themselves into the ground doing stupid shit their users want nothing to do with. What Mozilla is doing now is pretty much EXACTLY what they did as Netscape.

The difference now is that Chrome and to a lesser extent Safari are fully capable replacements for both.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Lachlan Hunt]

Opera does hold patents and does sometimes patent new inventions. (As an employee, I am forbidden from discussing specifics and I don't know if a patent application was even filed for this particular feature). However, for specifications developed within or submitted to the W3C, Opera is subject to the W3C patent policy.

Re:Sounds interesting

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Look at FireFox and Opera.

Re:Sounds interesting

[blahplusplus]

Firefoxes fucking problem is user interface and that it keeps breaking plug-ins. What they really need is to make peoples web experience BETTER. I use chrome ONLY because it is fast and the interface doesn't get in the way PLUS it has the ability to search your bookmarks like you search your email in gmail. That alone is a huge boon so you no longer have to use services like Delicious and tag everything, even though I think delicious is still a great alternative for finding great stuff they don't have a client side program everything is centralized on the server and you have to login, great for them to monitor users habits/trends in peoples tastes not so good for end users.

A breakthrough they could work on is auto-organizing bookmarks according to topic, and index peoples bookmarks by tags. tagging is a great idea but it needs to be automated because sometimes a search just doesn't cut it. If firefox team had someone on their team with vision they could take web browsing to the next level. There are tonnes of firefox plugins I've found that I've often wishes were just incorporated into the browser as a feature.

Re:Sounds interesting

[cgenman]

So that people know what they're talking about, Opera was the first (or one of the first) browsers to offer:

Tabbed interface (and MDI before tabs)
Saved Sessions
Previous windows re-opening when you launch the browser
Mouse Gestures
Virtual folders in Mail
RAM Cache
Zooming
Integrated search
Speed dial
Undo of closing tabs
Using the user's CSS and Javascript instead of the site's

A lot of others that failed because they were shots in the dark (integrated web server? voice control?)
Others that succeeded that I'm probably forgetting.

Really, if you follow the development of the browser for the past 10 years or so, Opera has basically been the experimental branch of the tree. Features are created by opera, then integrated into other browsers. Recently, Chrome has done some nice experimentations, and Firefox's extensions saw a burst of weird creativity. But for day-in, day-out browsing, Opera has really defined a lot of the features we now take for granted.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Toonol]

I would be so happy if Firefox reverted back to stealing from Opera, instead of stealing from Chrome. I used to use Opera back in the day, but happily switched over to Firefox somewhere in the 1.x period. Now, FF is driving me back to Opera.

Re:Sounds interesting

[dgatwood]

However, what you are claiming is not entirely fair. If it's built into CSS then it is almost certainly easier in CSS than in TeX. The point is that due to the capabilities of TeX, you can do things that the CSS designers never thought of (like those crop margins).

Except that due to package incompatibility problems, I ended up writing my own code to do the crop marks because it was easier than getting everybody to work together. I think it would have taken less code to write a paginating typesetter in JavaScript than it took to make LaTeX behave. If I had such pagination code in HTML/CSS, the CSS for those crop margins would once again have been about four lines of CSS once I had an actual div or other equivalent page object representing a printed page.

But anyway, the conclusion is that CSS is higher level and makes anything that fits its model easy. However, many things are simply impossible in CSS.

Only if you don't consider JavaScript. Once you factor that in, about the only thing I can think of that HTML/CSS lacks is a notion of determining which page something will fall on when printed, which as I said, is probably a couple thousand lines of code at most, and maybe just a few hundred. I'm almost tempted to write it some weekend just for fun.

Re:Sounds interesting

[jd]

The point is that Opera wanted pages, not scrollbars, which means that the starting point has to support pages. How you personally want it doesn't alter what Opera wants, it merely means you've got to cater for both.

LaTeX doesn't need to make use of pagination. If it were to be supported in a browser, then the browser would do what it does for everything else - provide overrides. In this case, you want an override which says that no matter what size of page the LaTeX document declares, the browser should always render it into a format equal to the width of the browser screen and an infinite length.

Ok, the problem of fragility was mentioned by another poster. Meh. The macros are all open-source. It would take a long time to get them all cleaned up, but look at it from this perspective instead - how long would it take to get a basic subset rock-solid (given that these are scripts) versus hacking Opera to support the entire typesetting concept in one go?

It would seem to me that fixing the LaTeX scripts (something that can be done on a rolling basis) is going to require fewer man-hours than inventing a whole new style of UI (which has to be complete in order to work at all) but also is something that can be used before it is complete.

As for LaTeX 3, yes, that's becoming something of a joke. At this point, I'd much rather see a fork of LaTeX that attempted to get the "missing" functionality sorted out all put into a single engine. Just as LaTeX 2 fragmented to the point where the maintainers couldn't stand it and actually got off their backsides to produce LaTeX 2e from the assorted engines out there, LaTeX 3 is likely to only come about when engineers fragment LaTeX 2e.

In light of the comments made about the stability, I'd say that one feature of such a fork needs to be decent script debugging. Another should be namespace support and encapsulation. Those three features alone should make a lot of macros a lot safer, though you'd still want some actual cleanup work to get the macros in decent shape.

In light of the CSS remarks, I'd say another feature needs to be to provide high-level macros that allow you to perform the functions available in CSS 1-3 via the facilities in TeX.

All four changes could probably be implemented by a small team in a year or less, with few to no distractions.

Re:Sounds interesting

[dgatwood]

My browser doesn't do hyphenation or ligatures, the kerning is probably rather bad, and I don't think that the line breaking algorithm is as good as the one in TeX.

Hyphenation is part of the CSS3 draft standard, and is supported by all WebKit browsers and Firefox in one form or another (-webkit-hyphens: auto; -moz-hyphens: auto; hyphens: auto;).

Ligature support is normally part of the OS's type rendering system, and should be used automatically if the font contains the ligatures and if they are properly specified in the font. If they aren't, assuming you already create a JavaScript rendering engine with some sensible text callbacks built-in, it would take only one line of JavaScript to perform the necessary text substitution. And if you want manual control, as long as you use the UTF-8 character set for your HTML content, you can forcibly insert a specific ligature in a particular spot by inserting the right UTF-8 character code instead of the code for the letters that make it up.

Kerning is a matter of your OS's type rendering system, so if you're using an OS that actually understands all those OpenType kerning things, it should do very nearly the same job as XeLaTeX. If it doesn't, get a better OS.

Moreover, there is no reasonable way to set the line length (half of the websites use a very small column, and the other half use the full window width which is generally too wide), and making a table of content is a pain in the ass.

That's not really that relevant to using a specific engine (e.g. WebKit) as a typesetter (which is what I was talking about). What you're talking about is inconsistencies in the way different sites design their content. Now, LaTeX might make two-column content easier, I'll admit, but outside academic papers (for which LaTeX works reasonably well) and newspapers (for which layout is, by necessity, done by hand), that's not exactly a common layout style for publishing.

LaTeX really doesn't have a very good way to say that the end-of-section marker must be on the same page as at least two lines of the previous paragraph

I't called a widow, and you can prevent them with \widowpenalty=10000. By default, they are only discouraged because sometimes they look less ugly that the other alternatives.

No, that's not a widow. A widow penalty tries to ensure that you don't get the last line of the paragraph by itself on the next page. LaTeX provides no equivalent functionality for saying that the line of content after that paragraph (e.g. a \vspace followed by a centered *** section mark) may not be by itself. Nor, AFAIK, does LaTeX provide a way to avoid what I would call widow paragraphs (an entire one-line paragraph appearing by itself) because it renders content a paragraph at a time. As far as LaTeX is concerned, that isn't a widow because the entire paragraph appears on the page.

And while we're talking about LaTeX issues, I forgot one really nasty one that caused all sorts of problems for me. LaTeX doesn't handle UTF-8 very well at all. By default, it inserts no wrapping around the em dash. I ended up adding code to the XSLT that I'm using to produce the LaTeX markup so add a hair space after the em dash, which LaTeX then happily treats as a word break. Prior to that, I was getting the most horrendous overfull and underfull hbox problems I've ever seen whenever an em dash appeared near where a line should break....

Re:Sounds interesting

[dgatwood]

Don't know about resetting brain thing, but "how the last page ended" easily happens if something distracts you just as you read last paragraph and flip the page.

Exactly. Also, if the content itself transitions abruptly, you often wonder if you've turned two pages accidentally, which means you have to go back and check the page numbers. That's pretty clumsy.

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

Overreacting a bit aren't we?

Opera was (and on some points still is) the first and only browser to provide all that functionality in a stable and productive environment. I didn't say they did invent all these things but they publicized them really well. I am not sure about the facts and I don't care that much about those to be honest, the fact is that in 2000 and way up until ff3.5 if you wanted work done you used Opera.

Re:Sounds interesting

[justforgetme]

Agree to the second paragraph but you really have to take a closer look at what creates the current patent warfare climate. Only by understanding better the problem will you be able to adequately judge proposed solutions.
And for what it's worth: "Fuck IP" it's only an idea anyway

Re:Sounds interesting

[unrtst]

As a developer, I see that list as a list of excellent examples of things that should not be allowed to be patented.

I'm tempted to get into who did what first, or the history of those features in other places, but putting that aside for a second...

Tabbed interface (and MDI before tabs)
MDI is ancient, and all the info was readily available inside the apps already - it's just GUI stuff. Ditto on Tabbed interfaces - it's a nice and useful layer to get to all the stuff that was already available.

Saved Sessions
I love these, but it's really just a very very small pre-existing action before closing (an on close hook), and one at startup - bookmark all; open bookmark group. They just hide that "bookmark group" and call it a session.

Previous windows re-opening when you launch the browser
I think I confused the previous saved sessions with this... it's the same thing, and maybe saved sessions is just a manual bookmark all.

Mouse Gestures
Gestures themselves are an interesting take on user input. Supporting them is just part of keyboard mapping of hotkeys, and those are some new hotkeys that are available.

Virtual folders in Mail
These go by different names and implemented a little differently. Calling them virtual folders was a nice change in perspective, but saved searches are nothing new or unique (see pine/alpine for example).

RAM Cache
Something that is just bloat and should be provided by the OS. Including it in the browser does make it more accessible to normal users, but it's just another route to something that is already readily available internally.

Zooming
Is this just changing the font size preference to "+1, +2, +3, etc", something that's already there, but this provides a nice name for it and a shortcut? or is it full page zoom (ex. images zoom too), which (IMO) should be a window manager feature (and is in many places).

Integrated search
A bookmark with an sprintf to inject the search string, separated out and called something else. (personally, I strongly dislike this feature, but I do like the keyword based location bar custom searches - where I can type CPAN[tab] and then search my custom bookmarklet for cpan). Either way, it's one of the simplest features ever added - a url handler to a web browser which already does a TON of url handling and has ample libraries for dealing with stuff like that.

Speed dial (I don't know what this one is)

Undo of closing tabs
IE. shortcut to the browser history. I am VERY glad this was made easier, but it's just wrapping up some common actions to make them more accessible day-to-day (which is great, and what people should be doing, but I'm framing this in a should-not-get-patented light).

Using the user's CSS and Javascript instead of the site's
First time I ever heard of CSS, I thought that was one of the primary ideas behind it. Once again, making it more accessible to the average user is certainly welcome, but all the internal to handle this were already in place in all browsers. A very simple proxy server could do it with ease (but it's not as "user friendly" and not integrated).

So many of these already had solid support outside the browser, and pulling those features in would often be labeled feature bloat... but Opera has remained quite fast and small. I've gotta admit, I'm impressed with that. It's what I had hoped gecko/mozilla/firefox would have turned into.

The above is not meant to be a negative review of what Opera has done (in fact, I meant the opposite)... just bothers me some of the very very simple things that somehow get patented, when all they often break down to is a macro with a shortcut and a new menu item for it.

Re:Sounds interesting

[howcome]

PgUp/PgDown in a scrolled view will often cut of text at the top/bottom. In many cases, pages will be more beutiful, and more readable. Of course, if you prefer to use a scrollbar, you will be allowed to. Just set '* { overflow: visible } in your personal style sheet.

Re:Sounds interesting

[steveg]

Tabs are fine. User scripts are fine. The rest, yup, really bad ideas.

Re:Sounds interesting

[steveg]

Yes they have.

And webmasters that do that really need to be dragged naked through cactus.

Re:Sounds interesting

[suutar]

That's the theory. In practice you can get a vague enough description of the implementation past the PTO to claim that anything implementing the idea infringes. To get past that you have to convince a court that you're right, which is an uphill battle at best.

Re:Sounds interesting

[kiwix]

I agree that recent browsers do a decent jobs when they collaborate properly with the OS, and when you have good fonts installed (and I'm glad to see that hyphenation is finally coming to the browser). But that's quite recent, and I don't how many users will have such a setup.

In any case, I think that you will get at best a Word-like rendering which is still not as good as what LaTeX can do. You can also get various improvements using javascript, but then the code will be much more complex that the LaTeX code...

Re:Sounds interesting

[UpnAtom]

Zoom zooms images as well and has done for 12+ years.

They recently converted it from a dropdown box into a slider.

Re:Sounds interesting

[locopuyo]

FF is Netscape. They branched off of the netscape code and changed the name.

Re:Sounds interesting

[sonicmerlin]

It's not the patents themselves that are the issue, but how they're implemented and how the system works. Unlike hardware patents, the details of software patent infringement claims can't be viewed by the defendant. So when Microsoft threatens Google's Android OS over software patents, Google has absolutely no way of legally knowing exactly what part of their code Microsoft is suing them over. If they did, they could easy change how a technique is implemented. Google can do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation and instead must pay licensing fees if they lose the lawsuit. This situation is patently insane (pun intended).

In hardware patent lawsuits like Apple vs. Samsung, both Samsung and the rest of the public can determine what exactly Apple is suing over. Samsung can easily change their tablet's form factor to meet Apple's demands.

That said, I certainly don't want to ever see Europe implement software patents. Diversity is nice.

Re:Sounds interesting

[dgatwood]

The biggest problem is that adding support for something like LaTeX would likely detract from the adoption of web standards like CSS3. Half the browsers wouldn't touch it, which means it wouldn't work everywhere. The other half of the browsers would support it in lieu of improving CSS further. And in general, there would not be the same push to make CSS a full-featured style system. Cynically put, the best thing that could happen in the typesetting world would be for LaTeX to just suddenly go away, thus forcing the rest of the industry to take the time to innovate its way out of the half-assed mess it is in now. :-)

...But that's quite recent, and I don't how many users will have such a setup.

I wasn't suggesting piles of JavaScript as a solution for a normal web page. That's massive overkill. Most web pages really don't need to be perfectly wrapped into multiple pages for printing, etc. For the 99% case, a couple of page break CSS rules will result in a printout that's good enough, and frankly, I can't imagine more than a fraction of a percent of web designers even caring enough to do that. Heck, it took years just to get those CSS properties added to boarding pass web pages, and those are solely designed to be printed. :-)

I was suggesting that it would be possible to write a LaTeX-like typesetter for printed copy using JavaScript. In other words, standardize on HTML (or XML written in a dialect that can readily be transformed into HTML) as the one true document format for pretty much everything, and use it as the source format for creating content in PDF format, printed books, etc. It might or might not even be in a browser. I could see it being a command-line tool written using WebKit or something.

Such a JavaScript formatting engine could be built into the handful of mobile devices whose screens are too limited to handle scrolling. For the other 99% of browsers, it really isn't necessary unless you're creating content for publication.

Re:Sounds interesting

[kmoser]

OMFG. The concept of paging has been around for eons. You may be too young to remember this but before 1990 there was no such thing as the "Web". We installed standalone programs on our PCs, kind of like how you install apps on your smart phone now. You may also find it hard to believe but at one point there was no such thing as a GUI with scroll bars. How did we see the rest of the page? Simple: we pressed a button on the keyboard which brought us to the next page. Kind of like the swipes and other multi-touch gestures on your fancy-ass iTablet thingy, only much, much simpler: you only needed one finger, and all you had to do was press the button (which was clearly labeled) on the keyboard. Crazy, right?

Re:Sounds interesting

[Cili]

Saved sessions (including the auto-saved one that loads when you start the browser again) and closed tabs also keep their history (back/forward), so it's not the same as re-opening a list of bookmarks.

Re:Sounds interesting

[Smallpond]

I'm pretty keyed into the patent issues since I've both generated patents for the place I work and had to defend my work from patent infringement claims. I don't see how preventing patent sales or assignments would improve things for inventors, it would reduce our value to companies.

[Large Company who I won't name] has a team of lawyers who make money by licensing patents. What this means is that they first send you a sternly written letter that you are infringing and requesting a meeting. You review their vaguely worded patent that has little to do with your product, and a lot to do with the fact that they have pursued this claim with other folks in the past, always successfully. You and your lawyer sit down across the table and eventually come to an agreement where they license you the patent in exchange for a percentage of the profits from the product. For a high-tech product this may work out to be 2-3% of what it cost to develop the product. If we had our own patent portfolio like the big guys, we would have fired back a countersuit. Since we're small, its just the cost of doing business. We factor it in. As far as I'm concerned its just another tax.

Then there are ones like the cursor patent on the X-or operation. I got hit with that one back in the 80's when I designed a display controller. Its tough to blame the trolls if the PTO hands out a patent on a well-known mathematical operation see claim 11. It didn't matter to me whether it was the original inventor or someone who had bought the patent. The problem was not that the patent had been sold, it was that it was granted in the first place.

Re:Sounds interesting

[cgenman]

Opera also did a great job with back / forward saving editing fields. You could be writing an e-mail, accidentally close the browser, re-open it, and it would still be there.

Or you could do what I seem to do a lot: start typing about something, absentmindedly click a link to get more info, and return with your text still intact.

Are you listening Chrome Team? Copy this feature next please.

Crappy websites already do this

[LateArthurDent]

A lot of ad-supported sites will do this. They'll release an article and split it up into multiple pages so they can display more ads. What happens when an article like that gets posted to slashdot? Everyone understandably complains that it's harder to read the article, and somebody posts a link to the printer-friendly version.

Multiple pages are not easier to navigate. Not even on tablets.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Hatta]

No kidding. If tablets have a problem with scrolling, fix the tablets.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[TechLA]

Note that they aren't proposing replacing scroll bars, they're proposing adding "pages" as CSS element. They also say this lets user decide if they want to have pages (great for tablets) or the old style scroll bars.

Frankly, I think their idea is great, especially considering how many news sites have switched to using pages made with actual different pages. What Opera is proposing would fix that and would let you choose what style you want, directly in your browser. Personally I enjoy pages if the content is long, but I know many here on Slashdot like to read the print version just because it doesn't have paging.

As Opera's focus with this seems to be tablets, it also makes lots of sense. It actually sucks trying to scroll the web browser with your finger. It works better with a mouse and mousewheel, but tablets would be greatly improved if the browser could do the paging itself and show exactly the amount of content that fits the screen. With a single tap you could go to next "page".

This way everyone would be happy, but with tablets and computers, because it actually allows the user choose their preferred way.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Baloroth]

It isn't 'pages' in the same way those ad-ridden sites are. What they mean is that the whole thing is loaded, and displayed in discrete junks. No additional ads, loading times, or clicks. So, it would be a bit like using the Page Up/ Down keys (in a program where those actually go whole pages) or setting your scroll-wheel to jump whole pages, and formating the results nicely to fit into those junks. I have to say, as someone who uses a small (3.7") tablet nearly every day, this would be damn useful for a lot of things. Opera Mobile's column-text formatting is pretty good already. Wouldn't work on everything, such as /. comments, but for things like news articles, it could be extremely useful.

If you even glance at the examples on TFA you can see that this could be extremely nice. We are already used to the page-at-a-time system from books and newspapers, and scroll bars, while good on computers, nearly always tend to over/under shoot on tablets. This would eliminate that.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[jbov]

TFA doesn't have any useful examples. I count 3 images on the first link, 1 on the second. I really wish they would have shown an example of paging through content, either with consecutive screetshots, or a video. I can't make a conclusion on whether I like it or not, because I haven't seen it in action. The concept should have been better demonstrated in the article, instead of leaving so much up to the imagination.

Then again, tablets serve no practical purpose IMHO.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[EdZ]

Note that they aren't proposing replacing scroll bars, they're proposing adding "pages" as CSS element. They also say this lets user decide if they want to have pages (great for tablets) or the old style scroll bars.

I'm not sure how that differs from the current method of having a multi-page view and a 'print' view with everything on one page, other than renaming the 'print' view to a 'tablet' view.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[EdIII]

That's great and all, but I laugh at the emphasis on supporting advertisements. Seriously, why waste your time on that kind of development?

The only reason there are still advertisements is because there are 3 types of people in the world:

1) People who don't know how to stop it. Getting smaller all the time.
2) People who do know how to stop it. Getting bigger all the time.
3) People who have constructed a logical argument that advertisements are required and/or necessary, and that the act of bypassing them somehow constitutes unethical behavior at a minimum and outright theft at a maximum.

Category 3 is very small percentage. 1 & 2 make up 99.99% of all people on the planet.

Unfortunately, there are some very influential and strong people and companies in Category 3 that are always thinking of new ways to make 1 bigger and 2 smaller.

The last thing we need is a company like Opera actively enabling them to do it. The browser company that makes it part of their core functionality to increase Category 2 is the one I will be throwing my full support behind. Of course, naturally, Category 2 gravitates towards the browser that is the most effective at it.

All this article makes me want to do is support Opera a heck of lot less is that is their mentality.

P.S - That includes the one that makes it easiest to block other undesirable platforms like Flash, Javascript, etc. with as much granularity as possible.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[rueger]

Category 3 is very small percentage. 1 & 2 make up 99.99% of all people on the planet.

Nonsense.

Category 4: people who have more important things to do with their lives than worry about ads in web pages probably comprise 98% of the population.

I could mess around with ad-blockers and flash blockers etc, but frankly it just ain't that big a deal to me.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because those crappy websites pre- and postfix every page with loads of advertisements and hide the link to the next page somewhere between that jumble. But I've had a custom CSS stylesheet (for use in combination with Readability, when it was still a usable service) that automatically gave webpages a column layout, where the height is fixed to the height of the display area and you got as many columns as necessary to display the content. Bliss.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[mcswell]

I for one hate trying to keep track of where I am when I have to scroll (page, really) down while reading a long article--particularly when the (or ) takes me to the end of the long page, and the line I was reading before I scrolled down may be anywhere from the top of the new page to the bottom. If this new method allowed me to break a long page into a number of screen-length pages (or pane-length pages), then when I page down the last time, the next line of text to read would be the first line on the final page. And I would be a happy camper.

PDFs can be viewed like this, but since the pagination is pre-defined, you have to tell the PDF reader to enlarge or decrease the page size to exactly fit the pane. Which means that the font may be unreadably small. What I'd prefer, is a page length that adapts to the pane size.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[IANAAC]

I could mess around with ad-blockers and flash blockers etc, but frankly it just ain't that big a deal to me.

I'll offer up my own experience with ads. I've used some form of Linux and Firefox to browse websites for a few years now almost exclusively. When My last netbook died, I went out and bought another with W7 installed. I decided to just try W7 and IE for a couple days as it was installed - no ad blockers.

I have to say, it was an absolutely horrible experience. The ads weren't flashy/blinky as I had remembered them from long ago, but they were really distracting, interspersed throughout any web page I was viewing. I probably wouldn't have had such a problem with the ads had they been either consistently at the top or bottom of the page, or along the side where they wouldn't get in the way. Unfortunately, that's not how most websites are designed.

Once you've gotten used to not seeing obnoxiousness on a web page, it's really hard to accept it again. I've shown a few people how to add an ad blocker to their web browser and I've never heard a single complaint from any of them regarding any missing ads. On the other hand, I have heard complaints from some of these people regarding ads on their work computers after experiencing no ads on their home computers.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[artor3]

I'm with you up to the last sentence. There are three main reasons why scrolling is superior for PCs:

• Easy navigation - I can just use the arrow keys or mousewheel to scroll, instead of needing to click a tiny link at the end of each page.
• Condensed load times - By loading the entire page in one go, I can start reading while my computer loads the later sections. A paged article doesn't allow this, forcing a delay at the start of each page.
• Fewer ads - The reason websites do this right now is to get more ad impressions, causing you to have to spend time loading ads over and over (especially annoying with flyover or pop-up ads). Yes, they can be blocked, but you still have lots of wasted screen real estate.

On a tablet, these reasons are reduced or even reversed. Paging is easier than scrolling, since both are swiping gestures, but scrolling requires a controlled swipe. Condensed load times doesn't apply, since the idea here is to load the webpage all at once, and display it one page at a time using CSS elements. Ads would only be loaded once, and the really obnoxious types haven't yet infiltrated tablets (AFAIK).

Tablets have some fundamental differences from their keyboard-bearing cousins. Just because pages are an abomination on PCs doesn't necessarily mean they'd be bad on tablets. I'm glad at least one company is looking into making the browser fit the platform, instead of just porting their code over.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[EdIII]

You're wrong about the 98%. However, we can add another category... apathy. You fall into that category. Maybe your category is 15-20%. I doubt it. Most people I run into either don't know how to do it, or are already blocking. You are the first person I ever run into that just does not care.

Why it should be a bigger deal to you is that advertisements are one way that malware is spread. You present a much smaller target if you are not automatically running flash and rendering advertisements on all sites. Even trusted sites should be blocked by default since they are not always capable, or even trying, to vet all advertisements for malware. They just let it through, and sometimes allow it be controlled wholly by third parties. Not every site serving malware was designed to do it, but hijacked to do it. Big difference.

Basically, it is a good security practice to block all advertising by default, and especially flash. I also recommend keeping an up to date hosts file to block most known malware and advertisement domains. It is not foolproof by any means, but just another tool in the tool box.

Interestingly enough (at least to me) the only way to block that annoying pop-under ad from Fandango is with the hosts file. Cannot figure out how to get any other piece of software to block it, which was part of my point that there is a constant battle to push the advertising in front of your face.

If you can deal with it.... believe me... you don't represent the average person. The average person finds it disruptive and annoying to the experience.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[TubeSteak]

I could mess around with ad-blockers and flash blockers etc, but frankly it just ain't that big a deal to me.

It's one of those things many people don't realize is annoying until it is gone.

I've set up ad-blocking for people and, when a browser update breaks it, they let me know right away.
Try it sometime. Ghostery is a good one to start with, since it won't accidentally block anything that's not an ad.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Baloroth]

Ah, you mean the same Opera that is the only browser maker that supports ad blocking out of the box and has since well before AdBlock for Firefox? In fact, since before Firefox existed, although it's hard to find an exact date (early support was a bit crude, I suppose).

My impression after skimming the articles was that Opera wanted to position the ads better and less obtrusively. Many sites have ads that completely destroy the flow of text around them (or so I remember: I like many /.'ers no longer see ads on the Internet), and Opera's system seems to am at formating it better.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[ToasterMonkey]

A lot of ad-supported sites will do this. They'll release an article and split it up into multiple pages so they can display more ads. What happens when an article like that gets posted to slashdot? Everyone understandably complains that it's harder to read the article, and somebody posts a link to the printer-friendly version.

Multiple pages are not easier to navigate. Not even on tablets.

rabble rabble rabble prefer scrolls to codex rabble rabble

It's harder to read paginated text... really?

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[mooingyak]

You are the first person I ever run into that just does not care.

I'm in that category (ish). I have flashblock installed, and that's about it. It doesn't remove all the ads, but it tends to stop the most irritating ones. The rest... I just don't care about.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[martin-boundary]

I've used a text browser (w3m) for a decade now, and I have a similar experience whenever I have to use firefox. Any form of advertising makes a webpage unusable as far as I'm concerned. The other nice thing about text browsers is that they'll usually ignore the website's graphical layout. That's a more subtle point, but even without ads on the page, most "webdesigners" have appalling graphical layout skills. The funny thing is the first time I tried text browsing, the experience seemed amateurish and media poor. But by reducing the intensity of information being displayed, it actually improved the signal to noise ratio enormously, and I keep using it because I haven't come across a browser with a higher ratio yet.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[msobkow]

So what's wrong with letting people use the PageUp/PageDown buttons and clicking off the scroll-thumb for the same behaviour from a scroll bar?

Before you add page tags, you'd need to add flow-control tags to CSS, similar to what virtually every document processing program supports. Anyone with a functioning brain cell that works with large documents relies on flow-control configuration to break up pages, rather than manually inserting start-page breaks.

Then there's the issue of page size, which obviously can't be the same as the browser display, or you end up creating umpteen versions of the HTML document based on the capabilities of the viewer.

The more I think about it, the less I like the idea.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[msobkow]

I'm trying to think the motivation behind this through, and all I can think of is that they don't want to use PDF documents for paginated information because PDF doesn't let you embed ads.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[advocate_one]

you do realise that firefox has a really great add-on called adblock plus... that along with no-script and flashblock make browsing the web a very enjoyable experience...

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[martin-boundary]

Of course. My firefox is set up with adblock plus, flashblock, ghostery, and firemacs, but I still find the noise with graphical browsing higher than with a text browser: Pages take longer to load, they often assume some implicit width and height that requires either scrolling or a larger window than I'm happy with, the content is laid out in many different ways from one site to the next, font sizes vary for headings and content paragraphs, the text boxes don't have real editing capability (compared with emacs/vi) etc etc. I just find text browsing superior when it's possible (for heavy javascript pages or shopping it's not).

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[wvmarle]

For me on a new installation the first extension to install in FF is Flashblock. Not because it stops ads, but because it stops flashing stuff. Most Flash based ads flash, move, or are otherwise very distracting. To the point that I literally can not read the article text as the ad is too distracting. And resizing the window doesn't always work, and to do so all the time is laborious at best.

Another big plus of Flashblock is that it stops irritating background music. So I don't have to keep my speakers switched off all the time and so.

AdBlockPlus suddenly becomes far less important. The rest of the ads are generally static, animated gifs are getting rare as they are replaced with Flash. Google's text ads are totally acceptable to me, as they simply don't distract.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[jeremyp]

It's harder to read paginated text... really?

Yes. The act of turning the page breaks the flow of reading.

Codexes supplanted scrolls for many reasons. They are physically easier to store. They are physically easier for the reader to manipulate. It's physically easier to access the text in a non sequential fashion. None of these issues apply to text stored on a computer.

When stored on a computer, there is absolutely no reason to split the text at arbitrary fixed length intervals.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Trails]

Actually, scrolling on tablets is dead fucking simple and ridiculously intuitive.

What problem is Opera even fixing?

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[alien_life_form]

You are the first person I ever run into that just does not care.

I, for one, don't care. I did install the block extensions (NoScript, AdBlocks) tried them a couple of days, turned them off. The hassle of building whitelists vastly outpaced the convenience of having no flash ads, which I don't look at anyway (not to mention messing with the hosts file to block popunders - which I close as soon as they pop) . Never caught malware from that vector (running linux as my desktop, but also in my windows days).

Cheers-

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Ailure]

Ads does not bother me either, though I have noscript installed so advertisements from non-google ads sources tend to wind up being (indirectly) blocked anyway. But I'm not actively blocking any ads. Internet ads are rarely as annoying as TV ads, and the days of flashy and audible ads are long gone (as far I seen).

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[fluffy99]

I'm trying to think the motivation behind this through, and all I can think of is that they don't want to use PDF documents for paginated information because PDF doesn't let you embed ads.

This idea would certainly make web-browsing feasible on e-ink screens, where each screen redraw is painfully slow and chews up battery.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[tehcyder]

No kidding. If tablets have a problem with scrolling, fix the tablets.

At least on Android tablets, the difference are too subltle between a gentle flick to go down a screen/page and one that rushes you half way to the end of the document in an indecipherable blur.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[dzfoo]

The problem of staying relevant in an increasingly "Mobile App"-driven world.

Keep in mind that Opera makes its money as a broker for advertising networks. Reading the examples provided by the CTO within that context, it's clear that they are intended to increase the efficacy of web adverts: it not only breaks the content into pages, which forces multiple page views, but allows for the automatic inclusion of floating images on the content boundaries--perfect for guaranteeing that banner ads are always within the view-port.

            -dZ.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[sorak]

As for category 3, I used to be part of that category, but I got one too many viruses from a national ad networks that take no responsibility for the content of their ads. So, I went from "I will view ads to support the sites I visit" to "if they can't stop delivering malware, fuck 'em".

But another consideration is that this idea is going to be a clusterfuck for some sites. Too many sites use tables, either because they have legitimate data that serves the purpose tables were invented for, because sometimes css makes it incredibly difficult to do things that tables can do easily, or just out of lazy programming. If Opera wants this to work, they're going to need cooperation from the developers (and the companies that pay them).

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Inda]

There's already page-break-after in CSS. I used to use it many years back when exporting to MS Word documents (don't ask).

I'm confused.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[halcyon1234]

4) Full-text search. Rather than searching for "pages are an abomination" on one page, and finding your post-- I'd have to repeat that search on each page until I found the page with your post.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[BitZtream]

that rushes you half way to the end of the document in an indecipherable blur.

I've owned a droid and seen plenty of other Android devices ... never does it scroll fast enough to be indecipherable, unless you're counting the jumps between the lag?

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Zontar The Mindless]

/me flicks screen of his Samsung Galaxy phone and watches very long page zip past, all the way to the end, in a... dare I say it? blur.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[steveg]

As far as I know, every browser I've ever used (except Epiphany) uses the space bar to advance exactly one screenful at a time. I've been using this since someone pointed it out to me in the early 90s.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[dzfoo]

And interstitial ads between each of them.

          -dZ.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[EdIII]

Well... first impressions are everything right?

I don't use Opera, or really know anything about it. I have it installed of course since I need to see how pages are rendered in different browsers for my job, but the features and feel did not attract me nearly as much as Chrome.

Believe me, nobody was more surprised than me that such a new browser would be that good, but it was and is.

This is my first experience with Opera as a company, and they seem to be supporting the advertisers despite what you have pointed out. I get your point, but I don't think it is a good idea for any browser company to be announcing how they are trying to support advertising at all. It makes them seem like part of the problem and not part of the solution. Advertising, in part, is driving the whole copyright and distribution war since that is what companies are really fighting for. Advertising revenue.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Baloroth]

Ok, I really, really hope you appreciate the full irony of the fact that you are endorsing Chrome, the browser made by Google (one of, if not the, largest advertising companies in the world) in a post complaining about.. companies that push advertising. Oh, the irony!

But I don't really see how advertising is the problem. If it wasn't for ads, the Internet would not be able to exist as it does today. Many of the sites you like would have to be behind paywalls, probably including Slashdot and its kin. And not just that, but, taking it further, TV shows could only exist on premium channels like HBO. Ads, as annoying as they can be, support a lot, for minimal cost to the end user (I can live with minor annoyance). You could even argue that they benefit us (an ad for a sale could actually save you money). I don't see at all how it drives copyright and distribution wars.

I wouldn't necessarily even mind if movies (for instance) could be downloaded for free with (moderately short and preferably genre-chosen) ads you couldn't skip (it would depend a lot on the implementation). Hulu, for instance, is awesome and can only exist because of ads. It allows me content I want (well, a little bit anyways) when I want (mostly), meaning I don't even want to break copyright. It doesn't seem like ads drive copyright wars: in many ways, I think they help alleviate them. Some counter-examples exist, I'm sure.

No, I think the problem is greed. That's it. Companies think they can make more money off DVD and ticket sales than they can off ads. So they crack down, when what they should be doing is switching to ad-supported online streaming of everything. This would probably even make them more money in the long run, they just can't see it.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[EdIII]

Ok, I really, really hope you appreciate the full irony of the fact that you are endorsing Chrome, the browser made by Google (one of, if not the, largest advertising companies in the world) in a post complaining about.. companies that push advertising. Oh, the irony!

That is the search engine part of their business. I would not use Chrome if it did not support the extensions that allow me to block ads. AFAIK, Google has never come out saying it was developing browser technology to specifically support advertisements like Opera has.

I can see where you might see irony, for sure. However, Opera is the only company supporting a browser that is being designed around advertisements.

But I don't really see how advertising is the problem. If it wasn't for ads, the Internet would not be able to exist as it does today. Many of the sites you like would have to be behind paywalls, probably including Slashdot and its kin. And not just that, but, taking it further, TV shows could only exist on premium channels like HBO. Ads, as annoying as they can be, support a lot, for minimal cost to the end user (I can live with minor annoyance). You could even argue that they benefit us (an ad for a sale could actually save you money). I don't see at all how it drives copyright and distribution wars.

1) I don't care about paywalls or who has to "die". I'm sure there were some sympathetic people for the buggy whip industry when automobiles were first starting to hurt their profits. I will do everything possible to get rid of advertisements due to how much I hate them. Most other people are the same as I am, but just not as dedicated. Meaning, very few people would choose advertisements willingly as part of some overall big picture understanding, as you seemingly would.

2) They are not a minor annoyance. Advertisements have got so out of control they are a HUGE annoyance. There is a reason why when I watch TV shows on Netflix so many come up as being 20-23 minutes in duration, and why older shows are longer in duration. In show overlay advertising has reached such disruptive levels I cannot even watch TV shows on TV anymore. It is simply impossible for me to concentrate and get into the show. Sorry, my brain does not multi-task like that naturally and it takes effort. After a hard day of multi-tasking on 3 monitors the last thing I want to do is have to concentrate to ignore one stream of data to get at another one. Furthermore, those in show advertisements actually interfere with important aspects of the show itself. Many times an important element in the scene is blocked, somebody talking and moving their hands is actually obscured. That's bullshit, and paying for it is just stupidity.

3) Cost to the user is not minimal. I was paying nearly $100 per month for the converter boxes and programming on a per box basis. If I am already paying $100 per month, why the heck am I still seeing advertisements? I should be seeing everything with zero interference of any kind, and at this point, completely on demand. Clearly, the $100 per month is not enough to satiate all those involved, and that means it is not sustainable. Since it is not sustainable, the only sane solution is to let it die and live within our means. That goes for a lot more than TV and its associated industries.

4) Advertisements never benefit you, they benefit the advertiser. They are fundamentally tools that utilize deception and manipulation of the consumer. There are other ways I could be informed about a sale. When I want something, or need something, I do research. It is at that point the companies involved should be telling me that Company A has it on sale for $50 instead of $75 everywhere else. Basically, other methods and processes could be leveraged to accomplish the same thing and have informed consumers about the truth of a product, instead of which celebrity "loves" it or how much pussy it will magically get you by drinking it.

Re:Crappy websites already do this

[Hal_Porter]

In show overlay advertising has reached such disruptive levels I cannot even watch TV shows on TV anymore. It is simply impossible for me to concentrate and get into the show. Sorry, my brain does not multi-task like that naturally and it takes effort.

The thing you don't get is that most people aren't like you. I'm running Opera now - I've installed AdBlock but I actually disabled it - presumably some site didn't work and it did that to see if it would fix the problem. The thing is ads don't bother me enough for me to re-enable it.

Interesting

[sltd]

It'll be interesting to see how they pull this off, and how it works with web standards.

'Pages'

[fleeped]

You have to love how they specify 'pages' in quotes, like it's something new or has some overloaded meaning.

Re:'Pages'

[CannonballHead]

You have to love how they specify 'pages' in quotes, like it's something "new" or has some "overloaded meaning."

FTFY :)

Re:'Pages'

[TechLA]

That's because it has. It's not the usual kind of pages - it's single page with different 'pages' defined by CSS elements.

Re:'Pages'

[Jonner]

You have to love how they specify 'pages' in quotes, like it's something new or has some overloaded meaning.

It is overloaded. An HTML document is called a page. What Opera is proposing would allow one HTML document (page) to be displayed as multiple "pages." But you were just being sarcastic, weren't you?

compromise

[Ricken]

Hmm, I like the "Pages" part, but I don't like the "ads" part. Lets compromise: No pages, no ads. Great!

Re:compromise

[westlake]

Hmm, I like the "Pages" part, but I don't like the "ads" part. Lets compromise: No pages, no ads. Great!

No Deposit, No Return.

Someone has to pay the bills.

Re:compromise

[tepples]

Using an ad blocker? Enjoy your paywall.

Re:compromise

[AndrewNeo]

Enjoy not having your site visited.

No.

[unity100]

Would be a bitch to design and develop for.

Ads?

[Nethead]

What are these ads on webpages that people keep talking about? I don't see any.

Re:Ads?

[Geminii]

They're the things which are indirectly the cause of you having to click through multiple pages to read one article, if they haven't provided a print-friendly version and if you don't immediately close down windows with half-articles in.

Some Uses

[walkerp1]

This sounds great for E Ink, mobiles, and other interfaces not featuring a practical scroller. No doubt it also sounds great to advertisement purveyors. I won't be using it.

Zoom

[exomondo]

So what happens when you want to zoom in? Do you scroll around that 'page'? If so what's the point of having it as a page? And if not then how do you manage the content that is to the left and right when you're zoomed in? I'm assuming the stuff below and above what you're looking at would be reflowed into next and previous pages.

I like opera, but...

[CannonballHead]

I like opera, and prefer it on my tablet, actually. I run Firefox, Chrome, and Opera on my "real" computers (and IE on Windows), though I usually use Chrome.

The problem I have with this is that, in my experience, non-scrolling (whether it's a page flip or some sort of click-to-advance) alternatives to scrolling tend to be really, really slow if you want to zoom, like, half-way down. Or even worse, all the way down. I know, you could add quick little buttons to go-to-top and go-to-bottom ... but it's just generally hard to quickly flip a long ways back.

Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop it with this change for the sake of change UI crap driven by marketers and graphic artists.

Pagination sucks, whether it's in a book, a news article, or those atrocious CPM-mining photo galleries.

One page load, one click, then scroll with the wheel. Get it?

Seriously?

[izomiac]

Reflowing text is the default. Open any plain HTML page and resize the window. Developers have been intentionally overriding this so their page looks the same on every device, whether it has a width of 200 px or 1920 px (methinks most didn't think that one through). I'm not quite sure why this is the favored approach, but I suppose it might be because people like to make webpages like magazine pages, where everything is statically positioned, rather than coming up with something that looks good on a variety of browsers, screens, font and color settings. It's lazy programming to design for a single machine, but apparently that's easier for novices and very widespread (e.g. Android VS iPhone apps).

Re:Seriously?

[izomiac]

I'd argue that traditional design relies on the principles of traditional media. Much of that also applies to digital media, but much of it does not. Dynamic textual media has been mainstream for, what, 20 years? Nobody knows much about it, it's a new field. Heck, I'm certain sites like Facebook employ a great many "skilled" designers, but each new design is met with legitimate criticism. In established fields there are the rare masterpieces with the rest being "good" but not standing out enough to be great, which clearly does not describe the current state of web design.

The only real thing we understand is that a programmer with little artistic experience or an artist with little programming experience are both terrible at making webpages. From what I've seen of "professional web designers", their traditional design background makes them a bit too much of the latter, and static designs are an effect of that. OTOH, I don't design webpages for anyone else to use because I know I'm in the former camp, so I'm quite harsh when usability is compromised for "useless" aesthetics. A true master would be able to create something that avoids compromising either aesthetics or usability, and synergistically exploits both. Static designs are not a means to that end.

Refreshing ideas

[jones_supa]

Text can be reflowed into a column layout

Especially this might be a quite good idea. Reading screen-wide lines of text can sometimes be a bit of a PITA.

jQuery Mobile

[bigsexyjoe]

Wium Lie noted it takes “enormous amounts of JavaScript to achieve what is a reasonable experience but we believe we can make it better with native support for pages”. -And that enormous amount of JavaScript is called jQueryMobile. In jQuery Mobile, pages are div's with the data-role=page. From there you, can use HTML5 media queries to calculate your page. To be fair, RC1 just came out like two weeks ago, so it's understandable if this info didn't come to them.

Re:jQuery Mobile

[howcome]

True, is possible to split content into pages by way of JS. And JS libraries mean that not everyone have to write that code. But I challenge you to write a script that emulates the kind of layouts we are seeing here: http://people.opera.com/howcome/2011/gcpm/ss Each row is a series of pages from the same article.

Re:jQuery Mobile

[bigsexyjoe]

Wow! I didn't think you would personally answer me. Actually, as I was recently teaching myself jQuery Mobile, I started using Opera and it is becoming my favorite browser and I really enjoy Opera Unite. I hope it replaces Facebook. (My biggest complaint is that web proxy doesn't handle my python cgi correctly).

If you say it is harder than I think, I believe you. But jQuery Mobile does paginate things pretty well. And while the calculations certainly seem harder when you have images and columns, it still figure out the pagination. For short pieces you can probably just make the calculations in the browser and for longer things, I would think you can cache the answers on the server.

Anyway, so if I write that for you, will you hire me?

Continuous mode of PDF viewer is a reverse

[cjj]

of this idea. The tricky part is how well the content can be "reflowed". And as noted, this can already be (and is being) done with JavaScript. The proposal is only to make it native to a browser.

Re:No.

[jd]

Why? Pagination is a solved problem for most systems (desktop publishing, word processing, typesetting systems), there's no good reason why it should be any less solved for browsers. If worst comes to worst, develop a plugin for Opera (and other browsers) that supports one of the existing systems and therefore has known pagination rules.

I like it

[spermleader]

Web layout doesn't yet have a proper 2 column layout mode. Much needed. And Yes, the concept implies "pages". Opera has seen the light. Once again.

Re:I like it

[syockit]

I concur. When columns was first introduced to CSS, I was always toying with the idea of repaginating using JS to make wikipedia visually resemble a dead tree encyclopedia. Never managed to do it, I hope Opera will show the way

Re:No.

[unity100]

content is never easily pageable on the web. there is a lot of different kinds of stuff to present in a web page. contrary to what people conclude from big corp websites like google, apple etc, most of the web still has to stuff content onto websites. example below.

http://www.racinglab.com/

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use public transportation a lot, and the one thing that you can be sure of seeing on the train are tablets and ereaders. Laptops are not appropriate because they are clumsy to handle sitting down, never mind standing up.

Now I can't speak for tablets, but when it comes down to eink based devices, cleanly breaking up a web page into pages is a necessity because there is no such thing as scrolling. Ideally that division would be done client side though, because the parent post is right about it being done server side. But that is mostly because you are stuck scrolling anyway due to redundant information.

CSS paged media

[tepples]

they're proposing adding "pages" as CSS element.

Doesn't CSS already have a paged media module?

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[mattack2]

and most users don't end up using them beyond a week

You seriously believe that OVER 50% of users do not end up using their MULTI-HUNDRED DOLLAR devices for more than a week? Why aren't droves of people returning them then?

What color is the sky in your world?

Re:No.

[Zancarius]

Why? Pagination is a solved problem for most systems (desktop publishing, word processing, typesetting systems), there's no good reason why it should be any less solved for browsers. If worst comes to worst, develop a plugin for Opera (and other browsers) that supports one of the existing systems and therefore has known pagination rules.

This is a good point. I much prefer your plugin suggestion, because it circumvents the requirement that everyone adapt to paginated web sites. The plus side is that those who want pagination can go and get it, while the rest of us who feel that pagination is probably a tremendous step backward can continue doing what we're doing and finding ways to do it better, rather than having to work around yet another browser-specific oddity.

My argument is thus: Pagination is a somewhat archaic work-around for displaying content on a fixed-size media, like paper. It's no accident then that word processors and document exchange formats like PDFs are page-centric since they're typically designed to be printed. I don't have any comparative usability studies on hand, but I would argue that "flipping" a page on a screen-reading device rather than scrolling it is more likely to interrupt work flow--much like turning the page in a book.

Think about when you're reading a book before bed when you're quite tired. You flip the page, your mind wanders, then you have to turn back to reread the last three or four words on the previous page for the purpose of context, and then your entire mental flow is disrupted. Reading from the left page to the right page (in an LTR language) isn't as problematic as actively turning the page, because you're eyes can immediately scan to the top of the following text and continue reading. To this extent, I think scrolling is probably a reasonable compromise between active user actions and passive reading. With scrolling, it's feasible to keep the previous words on the screen for context, and you can continue reading from any point. The biggest disadvantage with scrolling, however, is that it's difficult with lengthy documents to flip back and forth between one section and another while keeping a finger propped between a few pages so you can compare material from an earlier chapter (hint: "flipping" pages on a screen-reading device doesn't have this specific advantage of a book).

I'd argue that flip gestures for turning pages on screen-based devices carries all of the disadvantages of a book while integrating few, if any, of the advantages. That said, Opera might surprise me and come up with an innovative solution that takes advantage of the screen, but the ultimate answer to this question shouldn't be solved by Opera but by a usability expert like Jakob Nielsen--someone who can do the studies to determine the relative advantages and disadvantages with real people.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[Duradin]

More than four computers in the country was a hype-based phenomenon, then room sized computers were a hype based phenomenon, then furniture size, desktop, luggable, portable, laptop, notebook and even your precious netbook (which have laster longer than I thought they would, though they're now more sub-sub-notebooks then netbook) are hype-based phenomenon. Deal with it.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Tablets are purely a hype-based phenomenon. While many have been sold, their novelty wears out quickly and most users don't end up using them beyond a week.

The Google Analytics data that allows me to specifically look at iPad usage only goes back to March - but from March to the present day, iPad traffic as a percentage of the unique site visits (on a gardening site I run) has gradually and consistently trended upward. For the past week (October 2-8, 2011) a bit more than 3% of the 5700-odd visitors were using iPads. The iPhone and Android phones were each at about 2.8%, and over that same period they appear to be similarly trending upward.

You're certainly welcome to your own opinion, but I see no evidence that anything you say is tied to reality.

Seeking to the next line

[tepples]

Open any plain HTML page and resize the window. Developers have been intentionally overriding this so their page looks the same on every device, whether it has a width of 200 px or 1920 px (methinks most didn't think that one through). I'm not quite sure why this is the favored approach

If lines are more than about 30 ems (60 to 70 characters) wide, it becomes harder for the eye to seek from the end of one line to the start of the next line without skipping a line or rereading a line. That's why so many sites put things like max-width: 30em on an article.

but I suppose it might be because people like to make webpages like magazine pages, where everything is statically positioned, rather than coming up with something that looks good on a variety of browsers, screens, font and color settings.

On a device with a very small screen and a slow, expensive connection, such as a smartphone using EDGE or 3G, your documents are more usable if you transmit and show smaller chunks of information at once. On a device with a very small screen and a slow, expensive connection, such as a desktop or laptop PC using a high-speed wired connection, your documents are more usable if you transmit and show larger chunks of information at once. CSS can help with the "show" but not with the "transmit".

Re:Seeking to the next line

[Archangel Michael]

I'm seeing a regression of webpage, that is once again optimized for less data needed to display content worth viewing, due to Mobile Markets. However to view those pages you must be displaying the proper User Agent String, which strips things like "FLASH" (iPhones, iPads) and Java applets (which don't run very well on Phones). giving you just the meat. Which is wonderful, IMHO.

Oprah Winfry may be on to something here.

[approachingZero]

Wait. Opera not Oprah. Long day.

pissed off

[thatskinnyguy]

Queue the pissed off people in 3... 2...

Go for it

[FyberOptic]

I used Opera for years before switching to Chrome, so I still have a fondness of the company and their innovations. More power to them if they want to try it. They always allow users to disable their new features, so it shouldn't be a problem. I know a guy who disables tabbed browsing and uses his browser old-fashioned, so Opera still lets him do it how he wants, too.

Whenever they implement this technique on Opera Mobile, it might even make me seriously reconsider using Dolphin if it works out as good as they think. There's still situations where scrolling a big page doesn't always work great on a phone.

Re:Dumb idea

[Junta]

But what about per-page advertising? Think of the advertisers!

Young whippersnappers

[soundguy]

Clearly no one in the "pro pagination" camp is over the age of 30. I look forward to the day these people get fitted with their first pair of bifocals or trifocals and realize that paginated information is inconvenient as hell when you have to move your entire head to "scroll" a page instead of being able to bring the current line of text to the optimum viewing position with a mouse wheel or similar device.

Re:Young whippersnappers

[Rary]

39 year old "pro pagination" camper here. Well, at least "pro this pagination idea". The beauty of it is that it's up to the browser to handle the pagination, which means the browser user can choose to paginate or not. So, you get your scrolling, and the "pro pagination" campers get their pages. Everybody wins.

Every browser already has this

[Solandri]

See the scrollbar on the right as you browse slashdot? Click above or below it, not on it. Will you look at that, it scrolls up or down a page at a time. You'll find that the aptly-named page-up and page-down keys do the same thing.

A dedicated gesture for this would be handy. But that really belongs in the OS, not the browser. We still need the scroll bar (whether it's visible, or hidden and you can scroll by dragging your finger up/down) so you can position text and pictures just the way you want on a page.

Re:Every browser already has this

[Shoe Puppet]

It can be used to scroll down or up (press the SHIFT key and then the space bar).

I had never heard about that, thanks.

Re:Every browser already has this

[Inda]

Space as Page Down is great.

Until some fucking idiot thinks I what to search his page using his form and focuses my cursor for me. Yes you Google and the other fucking idiots. The idea is that I don't have to touch my mouse.

Bless the FSM that GreaseMonkey exists.

Ummmmm....

[digitsix]

This is dumb. No.

the end of CSS as we know it

[Anonymous Coward]

PCPro:

It's achieved with as little as a few lines of CSS, using the "overflow" tag or a new version of the "float" function

Goodbye CSS properties, hello "tags" and "functions"! Quite a bold move.

line printer

[Locutus]

so how will that work on my Panasonic P1121 dot matrix printer? Stop trying to change what has worked for years!
Sorry, I just couldn't resist posting that kind of thinking. About time we started thinking of getting rid of a design which is there because we used to use line printers.

Don't even get me started on where 0,0 is.

LoB

As an option

[yacwroy]

Force people to use this? No.
Allow this as an option? Absolutely.

Make it default - probably a bad idea.
Ensure continuing support for page-less mode? Mandatory.

One article, one ad

[Antique Geekmeister]

Or one set of ads. Browsers are not for _advertisers_, they are for _viewers_. We can work with advertising to pay for content we want, such as on Slashdot, but forcing additional paging and scrolling for screens of variable sizes and user layouts is simply selling out to advertisers.

lame

[shadowrat]

This idea is lame. Content is on pages in books because of a limitation of the media. Digital content doesn't have the same limitation, why enforce it? I really wish kindle and ibooks would dispense with this page notion. Well ibooks anyway. eink has certain limitations or at least things it's bad at.

Re:lame

[c0d3g33k]

The fact that scrolls (content on a single scrolling medium) predate books (content in paginated format) suggests you might be wrong.

Re:lame

[k8to]

Not really, books are more convenient for:

  - mass production
  - structural integrity
  - a larger amount of surface area possible without becoming unweildy
  - comparatively fast access to any point in the text

None of these problems apply to continuous computer documents.

Not really.

[pavon]

The websites I have made already have a separate CSS stylesheet for print media. Adding another for online paged content wouldn't be that much work. I don't know how much benefit there would be to it, though. Tablets would need to be much more popular before I would consider it.

I'm also curious about how tablet browsers would indicate whether a site is in scroll mode or paged mode. I would hate for them to get confused by the lack of scrollbar and think that the first page is all there is.

Re:Not really.

[unity100]

not everything can be dissected through stylesheets.

Re:Not really.

[pavon]

But that is exactly what he is proposing. As far as I can tell, the server won't even know what "flavor" of the page is going to be displayed anymore than it knows whether the print or screen CSS stylesheet is being used now.

In Lie's ideal world, a Web page could come with different CSS formatting code, then show the paged version when appropriate. The HTML, though, which describes things like text and graphics, would be fixed.

There's a few good reasons

[dbIII]

It's a tradeoff when "fixing" the scrolling means giving up on e-ink. I've only got to play with such devices for an hour or so but I still think it's better to have a software fix of paging instead of even an IPS LCD screen. The pointer mouse in scrollbar model would really suck on a tablet anyway and scrolling by finger in the middle of a screen is annoying when you want to see an entire new screenful instead of just the next line.
There's also a much bigger computational cost to scrolling versus paging and that can be significant on low end or very busy devices. The Pascal editior on the early Macintoshes really drummed that one into my head - scrolling was stupidly slow with all that pixel by pixel shifting of the text.

Re:There's a few good reasons

[dbIII]

Did anybody say anything at all about changing the way the websites are written? The browser is doing all of the changes.

Scrollbars are better

[mehrotra.akash]

In many cases, normal scroll bars are better.
If you are going through a long document, instead of reading from top to bottom, then going back to the top in the next page, you can keep your eyes fixed on the area of the screen (covering 2-3 lines), and scroll the document so that the current text always matches with that area

Beige Box = Hard Drive strikes again

[dbIII]

But that really belongs in the OS, not the browser.

NO!
If you want it to be universal it belongs in whatever app handles general keyboard shortcuts - so in linux that is your window manager application and in MS Windows that's your Logitech helper app or similar, or a little config thing for explorer.exe in the MS Windows control panel. That way you can change it if you want without a system restart.
The operating system is the thing that sits between the hardware and userspace and does not mean Internet Explorer (as the Judge said), or the solitaire game or whatever.
Also that thing in front of you is not the computer - it's called a screen, a monitor, an LCD, a CRT or whatever :)

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[brantondaveperson]

This is a very strange position to take - tablets are probably at their absolute best when used for browsing the web. Might suck a bit when it comes to typing stuff into forms etc, but I expect it's possible to get pretty nifty on those virtual keyboard things.

I have an ipod touch, which is basically a wee tiny tablet. I've had it for probably three years (ish), and I use it to browse the web nearly every day. It's much more convenient than picking up the laptop, and I've even taken to sending short emails on it for the same reason.

I'd think that the tablet market is only just beginning, and by 2014 they will be everywhere. IOS vs. Android is much less clear, but tablets are without a doubt here to stay.

One Problem...

[multimediavt]

Define a "page". The whole point of a browser was to get us away from the confines of a page-based medium, like a book or magazine, so information could be presented without the interruption caused by the finite amount of space a "page" presents. Sure, we still call them web "pages", but that's an analogy used for cognitive purposes. If we go back to the finite page model, who's defining what a "page" is? Is it A4, U.S. letter, U.S. legal or what? Sounds like a step backwards to me rather than an innovation. I'm sorry, but in a digital world scrolling is better than flipping pages, IMHO. Don't get me wrong. I love real paper books for what they are (I own many books), but flipping pages digitally is annoying to me and trying to revert back to that model for digital content seems completely backwards-thinking and wrong.

Re:One Problem...

[Jahava]

Define a "page". The whole point of a browser was to get us away from the confines of a page-based medium, like a book or magazine, so information could be presented without the interruption caused by the finite amount of space a "page" presents. Sure, we still call them web "pages", but that's an analogy used for cognitive purposes. If we go back to the finite page model, who's defining what a "page" is? Is it A4, U.S. letter, U.S. legal or what? Sounds like a step backwards to me rather than an innovation. I'm sorry, but in a digital world scrolling is better than flipping pages, IMHO. Don't get me wrong. I love real paper books for what they are (I own many books), but flipping pages digitally is annoying to me and trying to revert back to that model for digital content seems completely backwards-thinking and wrong.

A page on a medium is a medium-full of information. In print, that medium is paper, so a page is a piece of paper. In the tablet world, a page is a screen-ful of information.

Continuous scrolling is good in some cases, but Opera isn't proposing to replace continuous scrolling with pages; they're proposing to add the option and let sites formally choose to do that.

Re:One Problem...

[vlueboy]

I would enjoy Page numbering a-la lynx. After all, some of us WANT to print content out of our screens without guessing how many pages of headers AND footers to "skip" in the manual page printing dialog.

With so much stuff on the web now, and so many printers at home, I see a problem in that you must either print preview, scroll down 13.5 pages AND count them by hand, and then do math so you can place "13" and "19" on the dialog's start and end page #s. "Print selection" gives no estimate of how much paper you'll waste. You can just abort if you realize that unlike "print selection" a page friendly browser would reveal your idea to encompass too many pages early in the game.

A geek alternative is to paste everything into a good old WYSIWYG editor so you can paginate easily, but that is unknown to non-geeks. Also, page selections are a tricky game with all the invisible stuff that gets dragged. And pasting tends to produce weird TABLE-related artifacts and font problems.

So I'd let opera have their attempt and get my pagination dreams, or at least see that replaced with a world where I can pick WIDTH=100% or at least a SORELY missing customizability option for width in Safari reader and copycat extensions.

Re:One Problem...

[alien_life_form]

Seconded. And, probably because of /.'s readership median age, I notice nobody has even addressed the superiority of liquid design for text reading when the reader needs to change font (usually to get a larger font size). The inability to reflow is what makes PDF suck on the Kindle for instance. Ando no, that does not spell "for the visually impaired" - as anybody approaching the 45-yr-old mark knows. Note that one can still scroll "and" flip while preserving liquid design.

Re:One Problem...

[Hentes]

Pages are defined by the finite amount of mobile internet.

Re:One Problem...

[howcome]

In Opera's implementation, the author does not specify the size of the output medium or where page breaks go. The browser will automatically lay out the content it finds room for given the constraints of the device. If there isn't room for all the content, new pages will be created. These can be accessed with PgDn/PgUp, gestures, or by controls added through JavaScript.

standard resolution?

[Americium]

Considering the plethora of screen sizes and resolutions across smartphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops and pcs, this seems like an absurd idea. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I want the text I'm reading to be at a certain location on the screen. This location covers perhaps 1/4-1/2 of the vertical space depending on the screen. I scroll pdfs all the time, especially textbooks with mathematical equations.

I also enjoy the dynamic rendering of html that changes as I make the window wider or thinner on a wide screen monitor. Depending on the size and resolution I will find a perfect width and zoom level.

This standardization, at it's best, would render pages based on both the screen size and resolution which the browser is running on. However many problems would occur, the simplest would be merely sitting closer or further from a large 1080p screen. I'm assuming if this was implemented by someone other than apple with a new revolutionary device, the result would be chaotic where most pages wouldn't play across all devices well at all. Perhaps apple products would work well since they have a larger enough user base for those standards to work well.

However, this missed the already dynamic nature of the web. As in one of the other posts, badly designed and spammy type websites employ this already. The only site I came across that used it was the IFW, Maine's government agency overseeing fishing and hunting. They post their yearly informative newletter, magazine, which is printed, in a horrible flash 'book' where the page flips are animated. No high resolution pdf, which would be great, where I can control the zoom, think of it, you could just load pdfs if you wanted pages.

Pages that I can scroll down are nicer anyway, like high quality search engines and all the porn sites.

So clearly, if this was something useful, it would have taken off. Unless there are thousands of website developers, catering to tablets, that are begging for this feature, it seems like another mistake from Opera.

Re:standard resolution?

[bytesex]

"Unless there are thousands of website developers, catering to tablets, that are begging for this feature, it seems like another mistake from Opera."

Point is, there are. It is the first thing that happens when you get together with a graphic designer who only ever 'did paper' until then: they ask you how you can make sure that the thing scales, how you can put things in the lower right corner - all so that they can get their aesthetics across. Basically all of those things that only flash could solve until recently.

And I get it, I really do. But time and again I have to explain to them: this is not how the web and html works. It was conceived as a flow from top-left to bottom-right. No pages. And yes, Tim Berners-Lee had a lot of ideas about usability and readability, but (being a proper computer-person) he just didn't consider 'prettiness' to be part of that concept. Even though it is.

So, while I'm not advocating to create a paginated web for the sake of better advertising, there are a lot of things that have, until now, been purposely left in the dark by those in control of html. Things that have made web-developers and -designers run screaming for flash and pdf. That's *also* an unwanted situation.

Re:standard resolution?

[FromWithin]

That's a big rant against attempts at innovation for something so minor, Mr. Anti-Opera.

FTAs:
"'Doing pages on a screen I think will be very important, especially for tablets,' he said."
"Opera said users will be able to switch back to scroll bars if they prefer."

Opera changed the browser for the better...

[C_Kode]

Opera changed the browser for the better, but they screwed up and allowed others to take their ideas and make everything else better.

I was an Opera user. They made huge strides pushing the browsers forward, but they allowed others to adopt their ideas which prevented them from growing. (that and sticking to standards that the world didn't abide by) Soon they had to innovate again and their new ideas weren't up to par. Just like this one.

Thank you Opera. You did wonders for the web browser. Though I'm sorry to say. Your time has come and gone. /goodbye

Re:Opera changed the browser for the better...

[rasmusbr]

What makes you think it would be a bad idea?

The way I see it scrolling versus browser-integrated page flipping would be a choice between granularity of control and ease of control. Scrolling gives you precise control over how you view the content, while page flipping would present the content in easy to digest pieces.

Choices are good if the user can easily understand them and use them.

In this case you probably wouldn't even need to have an actual switch. The browser could be made to deduce which mode you want to use based on your input patterns. For example, the browser could enable scrolling mode when the user scrolls the scroll wheel, or when the user makes a downward swipe on a tablet. The browser could enable page view when the user clicks a "next page" or "previous page" button (or uses the next/previous keyboard shortcut), or when the user makes a sideways swipe on a tablet.

CNET and Opera

[jcfandino]

I'm using Opera and CNET's styles do not work.

Funny they make an article about a browser they don't support.

Gee, If only there was a set of standards...

[Gyrony]

Google wanting to kill JavaScript, Opera with this. Google has at least a whisper of a chance with Dart. Does Opera have a stick big enough to leverage their measly 2% share to make this happen on a wide scale? And, do web designers want the browser messing up their layout? Does anyone actually consider Opera important enough to accommodate its quirks? I think not.

Re:tablet with scroll wheel

[pspahn]

No, Apple will not use a scroll wheel, they'll use some mysterious little nipple thing.

It's really about ads

[Animats]

What this is really about:

The technology ... is adapted to publishers' needs such as full-page "interstitial" ads placed between different pages. "We think there's an opportunity to rethink the ads on the Web," Lie said.

You've all seen those awful sites where each article is spread across many pages. There's a tiny block of text, flanked by ads to the left, ads to the right, ads above, and ads below. There's a whole industry turning out "Top 10 ways to ..." ad farms, and "reviews" that take six screens to deliver one page of content.

Now imagine those with inter-page ads you can't skip.

Bad idea

[paulxnuke]

This "feature" sucks so horrendously in Adobe Reader that I'd drop the whole program if it couldn't be turned off. (disclaimer: I mostly use Foxit and Preview anyway.)

It's somewhat usable for reading on an iPhone: easier than scrolling and trying to keep track of the position, but reading a (sequential) book is very different from reading a webpage where one tends to hop around.

Go for it, guys, but make it very easy to disable completely and permanently.

what is stopping them?

[Nadaka]

There is nothing stopping web developers from doing this now using CSS and a tiny bit of javascript. You don't need to change the browser or re-imagine how html in rendered.

Already done with CSS and JS

[TeknoHog]

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

Flipping pages would be the end of Slashdot

[G3ckoG33k]

Flipping pages would be the end of Slashdot.

No way I would flip 150 pages to see all comments.

NO WAY.

That idea must die painfully in a warm place.

Javascript

[mwvdlee]

Any website that wants to do this can already do it with some simple javascripting.
There's probably a good reason why most sites don't.

That won't work

[aglider]

They should mangle the HTML presentation part, thus killing the HTML author work.
HTML, as it is now, is inherently page-less.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[DerPflanz]

3% is negligible.

Let's not design anything for Desktop Linux anymore then. It's even less than 3%.

Your statistics are dumb. 90% is not everything, hell, 99% is not even everything. Certainly in the case of a huge market such as computing, 1% is not negligible, because it still stands for millions of users. There are 2 billion people online, some 40 million have an active Twitter account. According to your statistics, Twitter use is negligible.

This is how the iPad boiled UI designers' brains

[drx]

It seems to be trendy right now to emulate paper in all possible places.

The first step is to get rid of the scrollbar, although it shows important information at a glance, not like "page 3 of 26". It can even show where to find search results, see e.g. Chrome's scrollbar. But, hey, it doesn't look "minimal" so let's just get rid of this UI element that was developed for like 30 years and still has room to improve. Let's make it more "attractive to interact with", more "fun"!

The next step is to go to page flipping, because, well, that really improves orientation inside a document and navigation speed. NOT! People hate PDFs for a reason. The kitschy ways of flipping through pages on the iPad is a nice graphical gimmick, but beyond the fast fading novelty, it is very unpractical. How to skim a through document, how to quickly find an image that you have seen there? By flipping through all the pages again? Flipping pages would bring of course back new possibilities to solve problems with new crappy UI widgets, like a overview of images or a button to jump to an index, overlay it transparently over something ... too bad this problems already have been solved by the scrolling document and the scrollbar.

Browsers should enable people to read more, not slow them down and read less. If I want to look like an idiot while reading on a screen I will find another way of doing so, I don't need the UI to be fiddled with to optimize livestyle.

Seriously - if the patented it who would use it?

[Chrisq]

Seriously - if the patented it who would use it? How many web masters would implement non-standard css extensions that could never become part of the standard (well not for 25 years) and would only be likely to be supported by Opera browsers? The best bet for any web innovation is to make it free then push for inclusion in the W3C standards.

Yeah, let's make everything a slideshow.

[TxRv]

The whole purpose of this is to create a new place to cram ads in that are harder to ignore. You can't create a full-page ad when there aren't pages, and Opera wants to "fix" that.

Just one more reason to choose open source browsers.

No thinking required?

[sgunhouse]

Most of the comments I just read through are downright silly ... of course they aren't talking about a fixed-size page (the same size for all devices), they are talking about content that fits your window. On your smartphone, that's likely to be pretty small, etc.

CSS columns are pretty terrible if they go off the screen then wrap back to the top, if you have a widescreen then displaying columns makes more sense if they are also paginated. Or of course just have one column and interminable nav bars and ads and such in the other columns - yuck!

My browser doesn't take up my whole screen, I don't want it to. In fact, the width of my window is just over 800 pixels. Too bad I can't hide all that space Slashdot has on the left side of the screen ...

Some sites do this already for the iPad..

[WarwickRyan]

..and it works really well. For the iPad. That's because swiping your fingers horizontally is more natural than continually moving from the bottom to the top to scroll through a document.

already exists

[StripedCow]

See flipboard.com

Automatically layed-out pages.

Re:already exists

[StripedCow]

I foresee a new HTML element:

<format-it-like-flipboard-would>
blah blah
</format-it-like-flipboard-would>

Finally!

[SlothDead]

I always hated scrolling and how pressing the page down button makes you read a few lines again, since it doesn't scroll a full page.

Who came up with the idea of scrolling anyways? That's just as silly as putting content in little boxes that you can move around on the screen, so they overlap, partially hiding each other, thus copying the mess of the real world. Or having a button in a program that basically says "Don't delete my work when I close this program!" that you have to click at the end of each session (Or every time you close the program you will be asked "Do you want to delete everything you just worked on and revert to how it was before you opened this program?").

I'm very happy that there are people working on reducing the stupidity.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[Macthorpe]

I'm not sure why your post was modded up, being as it is a) Apple-centric and therefore ignorant of a multitude of other tablets/ereaders, and b) entirely made up.

Ahemmmmmm....

[justforgetme]

You don't like it. We do like it very much. Sure if you are a web developer you need to work much on FF and CR but nonetheless a lot of power users are die hard Opera fans and you know what? They are rightfully so. Also most of the devs I know and respect use Opera and the ones that don't use it are GPL advocates so it's a religious thing...
Opera is the only browser I have been using the past decade that hasn't screwed up big at one point or another. and yes, all the other browsers are copying them because their ideas work(In comparison to FF and CR for example). I still cannot fathom why chrome hasn't copied their gesture suite btw...

Re:Ahemmmmmm....

[BitZtream]

You don't like it. We do like it very much.

Do you live in Norway? I don't know anyone outside of Scandinavia who actually uses it. The only person I know that has EVER used it for any period of time was a Swede, but he didn't use it that long and went back to something normal.

Sure if you are a web developer you need to work much on FF and CR but nonetheless a lot of power users are die hard Opera fans and you know what? They are rightfully so. Also most of the devs I know and respect use Opera and the ones that don't use it are GPL advocates so it's a religious thing...

I don't know a single dev who uses Opera. I can't think of a single dev I know that uses Firefox because its GPL. If these are your observations than you need to leave the LUG meeting and join professionals in the real world. And for reference, I lead a rather large SaaS project, so we have more than a little experience with copious quantities of 'web developers'.

Opera is the only browser I have been using the past decade that hasn't screwed up big at one point or another. and yes, all the other browsers are copying them because their ideas work

Claiming browsers are copying Opera is like claiming Microsoft copied Apple for the mouse and windows on the screen. Its a silly statement, nothing Opera has done yet has been original. Everything they've done has been done by someone else before them, and don't even get me started on how retarded tabs are now days considering that they have reverted entirely to separate browser instances running on their own, the only difference between a tab and a new browser instance is that the tab shows in a browser window rather than on the dock/taskbar/whatever your OS users.

A good portion of why no one is copying gestures is because most of us know we don't want to make motions to control our browsers, we've had a Wii, we realize how annoying it is after the novelty wears off.

Re:Ahemmmmmm....

[GrumpySteen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Historical_usage_share

Around 3/100 people appear to be using Opera. Apparently you know less than 30 people. Perhaps you should get out more.

Re:Ahemmmmmm....

[justforgetme]

LoL mate, you really did get some smack didn't you?

BTW: the other respondents to your post are right. You need to get out more. You need to take a better look at gestural interfaces, not all gestural input is kinect. You need to revisit your logic. Last but not least, You need to get over Opera firing you. It really isn't worth it, torturing yourself like this.

One more thing®: Large SaaS project? You are from management aren't you? You buzzword slinging, flowchart summoning beast You :-)

Re:Ahemmmmmm....

[Geminii]

Gestures might be taken up a bit more with the recent surge in tablets.

Re:Ahemmmmmm....

[oursland]

And a ridiculous number of people don't use Google, but rather Baidu for all their searches. Know many of them? Because 3% of the browser share goes to Opera does not mean that it is distributed evenly.

Re:Ahemmmmmm....

[GrumpySteen]

Yes, I do know a number of people who use Baidu. I'm not the sort of person you want to ask that question of because I work closely my company's Chinese developers. China and Google have a long (by internet standards) and bumpy history, so it's not a big surprise that Google isn't the dominant search engine there.

Opera's share is not distributed equally, as shown in the link that I posted, and I didn't say it was. I suggested that the OP doesn't know a large enough sample of people to know any Opera users even if it was. The statement was obviously an exaggeration which mirrored the exaggeration of the OP's suggestion that only Finnish people use Opera.

And explaining the joke always ruins it.

Class dismissed.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's difficult to tell what point you're trying to make. It sounds like you're trying to say that the comment you replied to is wrong, but what you're saying actually backs it up.

Indeed, the desktop Linux market is negligible. That's why the only people developing for it are hobbyists and a very, very small number of businesses (many of whom give up quite quickly). This is exactly why we don't see modern games targeting Linux, for instance. They only get ported a decade later, when companies like Id release the code to their old games.

Those statistics aren't "dumb". They are absolutely correct. And, yes, Twitter is negligible. Very, very few people in the real world give a damn about it, and about the countless idiots on there spewing their 140-character useless opinions. The same goes for tablets. The proponents are vocal, but the long-term users just aren't there.

I think that is a bad idea

[Snaller]

The whole point of the WWW was that it was supposed to be resolution independent - I know a lot of people have forgotten that, alas, since it makes the web more accessible for everybody if you can adjust font sizes.

My eyes aren't what they used to be and I would like a bigger font (and even if you can't imagine it YOU will also be in that situation sooner than you think) - if they lock down font size to get pages that would be bad for accessibility.

But you say, they could reflow and recalculate it. Yes, the could, but then what is the point of "pages" it would still be a long page with artificial breaks.

Plus there is nothing more annoying on the new 'generate as we fly using javascript' pages that you can't search for content.

This is a bad idea.

Re:I think that is a bad idea

[pavon]

The whole point of the WWW was that it was supposed to be resolution independent

It still would be. The fundamental of the web design now is to seperate content from style; the first goes in the HTML, and the second goes in CSS. What this guy is proposing is that sites provide multiple CSS files, and the browser decides which to use (if any). This is already possible today with print, handheld, tty, and other media types other than monitor; he is just adding one more tailored to a new computing form factor.

My eyes aren't what they used to be and I would like a bigger font (and even if you can't imagine it YOU will also be in that situation sooner than you think) - if they lock down font size to get pages that would be bad for accessibility.

The websites don't choose where the page breaks occur, the browser does. You will be able to modify the font size just like you can now. Good web-designers will use relative font sizes so their site still looks good at multiple font sizes, but any website will be readable.

But you say, they could reflow and recalculate it. Yes, the could, but then what is the point of "pages" it would still be a long page with artificial breaks.

There are a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't view more than a page at a time anyway, and page swapping is simpler on a tablet than scrolling. Another advantage is that text is easier to read in columns than in a big wide paragraph. On a large screen my choices now are either to maximize the browser and have text be difficult to read or adjust it to have comfortable text width, and not be able to see as much of the content. His extensions would allow the browser to break the text into columns, allowing you to see more content at once in a more readable format. Finally, a lot of sites already do create artificial breaks. If they could be convinced to use this so that the breaks occurred based on my screen size, then it would be much more convenient.

Plus there is nothing more annoying on the new 'generate as we fly using javascript' pages that you can't search for content.

No javascript involved at all. All the formatting/reflowing would be done by the browser. Furthermore, you would be loading the entire article into your browser at once, and could search the whole thing, rather than the situation now where the server splits it into multiple pages, and you can only search that one page at a time.

Finally, many of the CSS extensions he is proposing would be useful in standard screen layout in addition to the pages layout.

Re:I think that is a bad idea

[Lisandro]

The whole point of the WWW was that it was supposed to be resolution independent - I know a lot of people have forgotten that, alas, since it makes the web more accessible for everybody if you can adjust font sizes.

Hear, hear. I can count the sites that have a clear separation between content and presentation with my toes.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[DerPflanz]

I didn't say the statistics were incorrect, just "dumb". Meaning they are meaningless in my opinion. I do not think you can say something millions of people are using is negligible and then just ignore it. It is fine for a certain person (you) to ignore it, but for one of the most innovating browser companies out there (to get on topic again), ignoring it, would not be very smart.

Besides, you yourself are saying that "very very few people" care about Twitter, yet there are "countless" idiots (whether or not Twitter is idiotic or useful is outside the question). So, what is it? "Very very few" or "countless" people?

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[tehcyder]

I use public transportation a lot, and the one thing that you can be sure of seeing on the train are tablets and ereaders.

It's not a great idea to use public transport and be oblivious to your surroundings because you're engrossed in a book to start with. Doubly so if you've looking at it on an expensive electronic gizmo there for all the world to see.

Integration and standards

[Hentes]

The reason is standardization. There are lots of websites with pages, but they use different methods to achieve that. If everyone used the same method than the user could decide whether they want pages or a scroll bar. Wich means that sites wouldn't have to bother sniffing if the user has a tablet, phone or pc, just serve the same content every time and let him decide.
As for plugins, the philosophy of Opera was always to integrate every feature directly into the browser.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[tehcyder]

tablets are probably at their absolute best when used for browsing the web

That, and playing Angry Birds..

I expect it's possible to get pretty nifty on those virtual keyboard things.

Not really, no. For anything longer than a text message they're just annoying. But once you tack on a USB keyboard, you must just as well stick with your much cheaper netbook withmore memory, faster processor and greater storage capacity, plus a sensible operating system and decent productivity software.

Columns recommendation

[tepples]

The best solution would be to permit column-type text flow

And apparently, this Candidate Recommendation for an extension to CSS agrees with you. One wrinkle is that the elements on a page might need to be reordered to fit the CSS flow model to any given screen width.

Group subscriptions

[tepples]

Despite that ACM, Elsevier, IEEE, JSTOR, Nature, Springer, and Wiley all have a paywall, they get plenty of visits from users on the campuses of subscribing universities.

no thanx

[SuperDre]

please no, I already hate the paging at a lot of forum/webshops (takes much more time to switch back and forth, scrolling is much faster).. But as long as it's optional I won't mind..

Re:Compatibility...

[findoutmoretoday]

<quote>I'd much rather the Opera people make their browser work with my bank's online banking system </quote>

Times are changing,  there was a time that my bank asked to use IE6 for security reasons and I had to cheat my way past the gate,  but nowadays I am free to choose. 

This is about standards!

[DragonWriter]

Your "Gee, if only there was a set of standards..." comment would make more sense if Opera's proposal didn't consist of two things:
1. Desktop and tablet browsers should allow the use of existing standard CSS paged-media features (which Opera already does in full-screen mode), and
2. Proposals for additions to existing standards-track specifications to make CSS paged-media features more useful, particular for the pages-on-a-screen use case

"Before this, therefore because of this" fallacy

[DragonWriter]

This is how the iPad boiled UI designers' brains

Opera has been using paged-media features for full-screen display and pushing for better paged-media features in CSS since before the iPad came out, which makes it hard to believe that argument.

Re:No.

[jd]

Easy way to do a comparative study. OpenLibrary reads PDFs and displays them as flippable pages, book-style. Google Books reads PDFs and displays them as a scrolling page. Find a book - any book, doesn't matter which - that exists on both systems. See for yourself which is the easier format.

My suspicion is that it's going to be dependent on the material. A novel has continuous flow, so I'd expect Google Books' style to be much easier. A technical document, where you're not wanting to read from cover to cover but randomly access material throughout at random times, would seem to be better in a random access format. Now, I wouldn't say a book is the ideal random access format (it's more indexed sequential) but it's a good first approximation. So I'd expect OpenLibrary to be much better for reference manuals, DIY guides, recipe books etc.

Now, sometimes you want to be able to pan around a document on a browser in the X axis as well as the Y axis. Equally, sometimes you want to stop the page from forcing you to do so.

My thought for a plugin is relatively simple. The plugin is told how large the virtual page is (with an option for infinite height - essentially how browsers currently work) by default. If no default is given, then the web page can provide a size in meta tags. Everyone becomes happy, everyone's viewing needs are met and Opera gets to have the functionality they want without ruining anyone's experience.

CSS

[Zamphatta]

Note to Opera: CSS pagination.

CSS and paged media

[DragonWriter]

And as noted, this can already be (and is being) done with JavaScript. The proposal is only to make it native to a browser.

Actually, the proposal is to add specific enhancement to the existing support for paged media in general in CSS. CSS is no more "native" in browsers than JavaScript is, and browsers are already free to (and some, e.g., Opera in full-screen mode for several versions, do) display content as paged, and CSS already has quite a bit of support for paged media.

Re:Nobody even uses tablets. That's the problem.

[mattack2]

How was it Apple-centric?

Re:"Before this, therefore because of this" fallac

[drx]

I have to admit I was just raging.

However, my frustration with scroll bars has nothing to do with Opera, I just needed an outlet.

As usual, Don Norman has more insightful things to say about this topic: http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/gesture_wars_20272.asp