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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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...