David Pogue Calls Out 18 Sites For Failing His Space-Bar Scrolling Test (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Finance's David Pogue: You know this tip, don't you? When you tap the Space bar, the web page you're reading scrolls up exactly one screenful... But in recent years, something clumsy and unfortunate has happened: Web designers have begun slapping toolbars or navigation bars at the top of the page. That's fine -- except when it throws off the Space-bar scrolling! Which, most of the time, it does.

Suddenly, tapping Space doesn't scroll the right amount. The lines you were supposed to read next scroll too high; they're now cut off. Now you have to use your mouse or keyboard to scroll back down again. Which defeats the entire purpose of the Space-bar tip. Over the last few months, I've begun keeping track of which sites do Space-bar scrolling right -- and which are broken. I want to draw the public's attention to this bit of broken code, and maybe inspire the world's webmasters to get with the program.
Pogue's article announces "the world's first Space-Bar Scrolling Report Card," shaming sites like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Yorker, and Scientific American for their improperly-scrolling web sites. (As well as, ironically, Yahoo -- the parent company of the site Pogue is writing for.) Pogue writes that web programmers "should get their act together so that the scroll works as it's supposed to. (And if you work for one of those sites, and you manage to get the scrolling-bug fixed, email me so I can update this article and congratulate you.)"

Comments

Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never realized that key performs scrolling.
Why don't people use the Page-up/-down keys anymore?

Re:Space-bar?

[Joce640k]

Never realized that key performs scrolling.
Why don't people use the Page-up/-down keys anymore?

It's almost as if you've never seen an Apple keyboard.

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you're saying that Apple keyboards don't have page-up/down keys, right?

Re:Space-bar?

[gustygolf]

They have, but they are only accessible using the Fn key.

On my Macbook (2006) Home/End/PgUp/PgDn are located on the arrow keys. I never had a problem with that, personally.

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither does a Chromebook.

Re:Space-bar?

[multi io]

They have, but they are only accessible using the Fn key.

Unless you use Alt-Cursor up/down or an external keyboard with numeric keypad...

Re:Space-bar?

[damnbunni]

Full-size Apple keyboards still have Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/ForwardDel keys. (Fn is also in that block, but it's a key I never use.)

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Model M's have all the keys, thank you.

It's the exact *opposite* of something Apple would make. Big, clunky, loud, and industrialist, and build to survive WW IV. It's exactly why I like it.

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have not removed the spacebar yet.

function keys, backspace/delete key, escape key yes.

They could remove the space key and insert them automatically.

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize either. Backspace goes back to previous page. so it's not consistent

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have not removed the spacebar yet.

Actually, they did worse - they eliminated the space character.

In the Finder or any Open or Save dialog, you can normally select an item by typing the first few letters, just like in Linux or Windows or Macs from earlier than 10 years or so ago. Try that on a Mac where the item's name happens to begin with a space.

Re:Space-bar?

[MightyYar]

I should probably file this under "Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to", but what purpose does having a filename beginning with a space serve? That would be really, really annoying in any unix-like environment. Or for that matter, in DOS.

Re:Space-bar?

[UnknownSoldier]

> but what purpose does having a filename beginning with a space serve?

Forced Sorting.

It is MY filenames, not the OS's filenames. That is why we have filenames in the first place -- to be human accessible.

This is why CP/M was designed by an idiot, which MS copied. You can't use colons (:), or double quote (") in a filename.

* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

> what purpose does having a filename beginning with a space serve? That would be really, really annoying in any unix-like environment. Or for that matter, in DOS.

Then get into the 21st century.

Apple solved the problem of filenames with spaces in 1984, but you command line guys haven't got the news yet?

Re:Space-bar?

[MightyYar]

Command lines handle filenames with spaces just fine. But the auto-completion stuff can't possibly know the difference between a delimiter and the beginning of a filename if you actually start the filename with a space, which is an interesting enough edge case that I was wondering what on Earth he was doing.

Re:Space-bar?

[mad7777]

Apple? What's that, some kind of fruit??

Re:Space-bar?

[MightyYar]

Why use the space, though? Just about any special character will sort before "a". How about an underscore "_" or the hash "#"? These characters work cross-platform and in most shells. I'd stay away from "$" and "%" because these have special meanings on unix and Windows, respectively. I'd stay away from "~" because that does a lookup on user. Any sort of a slash is bad news. But spaces and commas are some of the most common delimiters, so that seems like a really bad choice IMHO.

Re:Space-bar?

[chipschap]

Page-up/page-down are subject to the same problem. I know not everyone scrolls in this manner, but if you do (as I do) it's extremely annoying on the type of site mentioned in TFS.

But it's a symptom of a larger problem, alluded to in the "list of historical problems" post above. Web designers care about pushing their products and their adverts and little else. If the site isn't especially usable or even downright annoying, they could care less. And people keep coming back to such sites, which in the designer's mind proves their design is "good."

Is anyone else old enough to remember way back when, the then FCC director Newton Minnow referring to radio as a vast wasteland? The Web is getting to be the same thing.

Re:Space-bar?

[Hognoxious]

I'm sure they do sort properly in shells. But GUI file manglers often try to second guess you. Nautilus (which really ought to know better) ignores a leading underskid & ignores case to boot.

Re:Space-bar?

[mcswell]

The space bar is better than the page-down key because the space bar is big and easy to find without looking, even if you've removed your hands from the keyboard.

Page-up is a different question; you could in principle use shift-space or s.t., but I don't know of any browser that does that. Fortunately the need for scrolling the view back up is rarer than the need for scrolling the view down, apart from these badly designed websites.

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Never realized that key performs scrolling.

My son touched it the other day (he was 5-year old; he's one of the big guys now 'cause he's 6...)

I thought "whaaa... this thing still works?" Of course, I find this *very* useless, since there are other ways now...

> Why don't people use the Page-up/-down keys anymore?

There was recently a little invention called "scrollwheel" incorporated in mouses. Do you know what it is good for?

And no, you don't have to select the window. There's another nifty thing called "focus follows mouse". Unless of course one is using a backwater OS bad at usability, but good at profitability...

Re:Space-bar?

[roman_mir]

Apple keyboard? I have seen it, I bough it to have one of my devs work on the iOS stuff. However I find apple stuff fully incompatible with my way of working with computers, I got stuck trying to use the fucking thing a couple of times so I don't touch it.

If apple decided that their keyboards will no longer have buttons at all but would only have a couple of sliders and a touchpad, would the web have to adopt that as a standard for navigation? I think apple users should have their own web, where they can be secured against the evil world with its standard computer keyboards and keys.

Re:Space-bar?

[leiz]

Shift+space acts as a page-up in Chrome and Firefox, at least.

Re: Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

It ignores those because most often people want to see _x sorted at x.

Re:Space-bar?

[chipschap]

Oops ... television, not radio :(

Re: Space-bar?

[Hognoxious]

Muggles would never begin a filename with anything other than a letter. Even numbers make them nervous.

Anyone beginning a name with a special character is doing it for a special reason.

tl;dr: You're full of shit.

Re:Space-bar?

[mcswell]

omygosh, I thought I had tried that--thanks for pointing it out!

Re:Space-bar?

[Hognoxious]

Is this one of the devs that pays you for the privilege of working on your shitty POS app that nobody's heard of?

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple solved the problem of filenames with spaces in 1984, but you command line guys haven't got the news yet?

Us command-line guys just haven't come across a reason to do that.' UnknownSoldier' names his files this way as some sort of rebellion against his OS ('It is MY filenames, not the OS's filenames'), so it sounds to me like he may already be using Apple products.

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't space bar usually mean "follow link / select item that I've just tabbed to"?

But yeah, I would use either page up/down or arrow keys for scrolling. Except on google, which has inexplicably broken the functionality of these keys (they now move from result to result, just like I would expect tab to).

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was recently a little invention called "scrollwheel" incorporated in mouses. Do you know what it is good for?

Maybe this is only an issue for those of us who learnt to touch type, but I tend to fall back on keyboard shortcuts as the lazy option. alt-tab to switch windows rather than drag my hand all the way over to the mouse, page up/down because they're closer than the mouse, alt-enter to maximise windows, tab between links... they become second nature eventually. Of course the downside is that innevitably some program will break with the de-facto standards, which can really mess with your work.

Re:Space-bar?

[roman_mir]

No, one of the devs working on my shitty logistics system that nobody has never heard of.

Re:Space-bar?

[MightyYar]

It comes down to your task at hand. I (usually) prefer the Mac "natural sort", where it tries to get all fancy and put "a_10" after "a_9" instead of after "a_1". I almost never want "A" to follow "z". But then sometimes I'm dealing with a big machine-generated data set and the natural sort gets it badly wrong.

My pet peeve is that Windows does not offer a sort which includes the folders mixed in and that Mac does not offer a sort with the folders segregated :)

Re:Space-bar?

[Hognoxious]

it tries to get all fancy and put "a_10" after "a_9" instead of after "a_1".

The solution to that is to name your files properly, once and for all, at source. Because plenty of stuff (my current TV, most walkmen/mans(?) I've owned) just do dumb asciibetical sort.

Really, it should be switchable, like ls. Your way is -v, if you didn't already know. It's useful - when you want it.

Aside: I had some files which I'd numbered with Roman prefixes because $reasons, and I swear it sorted them "correctly" but I couldn't replicate it afterwards so perhaps there was something in my tea that day.

Re:Space-bar?

[toddestan]

Not to mention Windows actually makes it really hard to name a file starting with a space, as it will helpfully remove the space if you try. And if you clever enough to actually do it, Windows Explorer behaves really weird in regards to the file, for example it won't let you rename it to not have a space in front, as it thinks the new file name is the same as the old file name so the rename operation fails.

Re:Space-bar?

[RabidReindeer]

Apple may have "solved" the problem, but write your leading/trailing space filenames down on a piece of paper and hand them to a person and see what happens.

Forget about the "I'm in charge, not the computer" attitude, about the only real excuse for supporting this sort of thing is a weak "security by obscurity" - making it difficult for another human to access the file by its quirky name.

Re:Space-bar?

[RabidReindeer]

No, it's not just for those of you who touch type.

It's for people who have RSI, or any other sort of limited mobility, or for those of us who think that constantly dancing between mouse and keyboard is annoying.

When Microsoft Windows was first developed, it came with a set of standard key functions that made it possible to do almost any GUI function short of drawing in 2 dimensions using just the 104-key keyboard. Web browsers doubly offend me in that the browser itself steals many of my favorite shortcut keys, then webapps have limited support for the remaining ones.

I personally find the scroll wheel and related functions to be awkward on the fingers and tend to forget about the side buttons on the mouse entirely (not that all my mice have them).

Make no mistake - I love my mouse. But modern mousy webapps deny me the freedom to keep my physical flailing to a minimum and thus have mercy on my back, upper and lower arm muscles and my carpals.

And don't even get me started on pages where they don't pre-calculate image sizes so that the page content bounces around under the mouse pointer as the secondary components load and format. Or the auto-playing multi-media. Or the self-refreshing crap that sends me back to the top every few seconds right in the middle of reading the middle.

Re:Space-bar?

[MightyYar]

Thanks for the "-v" trick! Sadly it is not present on the BSDs, but I'm doing more Linux stuff these days at work as we migrate from Solaris so it will come in handy.

Roman numerals is a hilarious edge case. I'd love to see the bug tracker if you enter it :)

Re:Space-bar?

[blackest_k]

Xtrafinder

Gives macs a directory sort twin panes and a lot more.

Re:Space-bar?

[UnknownSoldier]

> My pet peeve is that Windows does not offer a sort which includes the folders mixed in and that Mac does not offer a sort with the folders segregated :)

Hear Hear! I agree 100%

Both Windows and OSX are dumb. There are times I want:

* folders grouped together, and
* times I want ASCII sorting, and (so that A_1, A_10, A_2)
* other times I want natural sorting. (so that A_9, A_10 )

When is Apple and Microsoft going to hire someone who knows what the fuck they are doing ?

Re:Space-bar?

[UnknownSoldier]

Because when I want an ASCII sort order space, 0x20, shows up first.

Underscore is 0x5F which may or may not come before A..Z,a..z.

Space also doesn't introduce extra visual noise.

Not everyone use case is the same but the point is, Windows, and OSX completely suck for sort filters for filenames.

Re:Space-bar?

[JesseMcDonald]

Not to mention Windows actually makes it really hard to name a file starting with a space, as it will helpfully remove the space if you try.

It doesn't try all that hard, since this works fine: notepad "\\?\c:\temp\ space.txt". Once the file is created you can open it and edit it normally, or delete it from Explorer. If you really want to see Windows get confused, try creating a file like "\\?\c:\temp\nul.txt". You'll be able to open the file through Explorer (as an alias for NUL), but not save to it. Explorer won't even be able to delete the file because it thinks its opening/deleting the special NUL device, despite the path and .txt suffix. (Naturally, you can delete it using "del \\?\c:\temp\nul.txt" from a command prompt.)

Re:Space-bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad if one gets RSI, and I totally understand if one is comfortable with the keyboard and doesn't want to use the mouse. I am myself from the VT-n era.

Now, that said, you don't "drag your hand all the way to the mouse". At least on Linux, your hand stays all the time one the mouse -- except when you want to type, which is more or less just like vim when one uses the "i" or "Insert" keys to type text.

Besides, one can drink with one hand and get to the mouse with the other without even looking at it.

Changing windows? If you can see a small piece of the titlebar, one click gets you to the window. If not, you either use a exposé-like thing, the tabs on the panel or -- better yet -- change to another virtual workspace (by clicking on the panel, too) and there other windows await to be used. I don't like it, but some even scroll to other virtual desktops.

One really does not need the keyboard. I put a movie to play on my computer and pause by just taking my wireless mouse to the sofa... no keyboard.

Now, I'll admit [Tab] is useful to skip from field to field in forms or online banking. Also, some nifty shortcuts can be used to e.g. instant muting when that wonderful page wants to play an ad with sound at 2AM.

Alt-Tab is not bad but I prefer to go directly to the window I want. That Alt-Tab "return to the last window" feature is excellent, though.

Re:Space-bar?

[Lotus456]

Thanks for the "-v" trick! Sadly it is not present on the BSDs

There's a reason for that.

I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[Anonymous Coward]

Spacebar for scrolling is the worst which happened to video sites. I want to pause the damn video or play it. I end up scrolling to weird places and having to scroll up and find the tiny play button again.

Re:I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[Anonymous Coward]

Just set the focus to the video player by clicking on it. I've never encountered a video player so far that won't capture focus on clicking.

Re:I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[Anonymous Coward]

But when you click it, it pauses the video. I don't want to pause a video in the beginning just in case I want to pause it later.

Having to click also defeats the point using the keyboard.

Re:I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[Anonymous Coward]

A way around this is to right click in the video to bring up the context menu, then left click in another area of the video to close it. It will still capture context but it shouldn't pause the video.

Re:I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[UnknownSoldier]

Agreed.

A partial workaround on YouTube is to use K to toggle the play/pause state. The problem is the video doesn't also have auto focus.

Re: I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[locketine]

Do you have media keys on your keyboard? There are browser extensions that enable them for sites such as YouTube. BrowserMediaKeys for Firefox is one such extension.

Re:I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[Misagon]

I find it worse when I have been browsing through comments below a video, I press Home to get to the top of the page and the video goes back to its friggin start position.
I then have to click around on the timeline to find the position where I was playing the video.
There was no visual indication on the web page whether it was the browser window or the video player that had focus - and the video is often outside the viewport, so why should it be able to have focus anyway?

Re:I hate space bar scroll instead of pause/play

[ChoGGi]

I use this to disable spacebar scrolling in palemoon (probably works for ff as well).
still works fine for typing a space and so on

window.addEventListener("keypress",
  function(event){
    if (event.which == KeyEvent.DOM_VK_SPACE && !document.commandDispatcher.focusedElement){
      event.preventDefault();
    }
},false);

You'll need some way to load js in the browser (http://userchromejs.mozdev.org/)

Old Man Yells At Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Senile at age 53, so sad.

Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it and it seems slashdot fails this test.

Re:Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Joce640k]

Works perfectly for me.

Re:Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you using an ad blocker? I am and I wonder if scrolling would work properly without it.

Re:Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Plus1Entropy]

I'm using an ad blocker and it works fine.

Re:Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Anonymous Coward]

What David Pogue fails to point out is that web "Toolbars" and "Navigation Bars" are some of the most useless and annoying things ever invented. Instead of these permanent bars that cover the page with useless content, place the navigation links at the top of the page, but don't make them hover permanently at the top of the page view.

I guess it's Apple's fault for not including the "Home" button, found on most PC keyboards, on smartphones. Such a button would allow mobile users to go to the top of the webpage and tap the navigation links. Instead, desktop users now have to deal with a fat, useless bar at the top of every webpage.

Re:Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it's better or worse when the navigation bar pops up when scrolling up, and disappears when scrolling down.

Re:Does'nt work in slashdot either :D

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it and it scrolls down one page. Or does the article mean scroll downwards instead of scroll upwards towards the top?

aka PgDn "trick"

[TeknoHog]

I wouldn't call it a "tip" or "trick" if the meaning of the key is obvious. Of course, kids these days might not see an actual PgDn key any more, and there are probably other reasons for the (unix)? tradition of using space for the same action, like HJKL for arrow keys.

Speaking of tradition, if browsers can respect the traditional space key, how about basic text manipulations like Ctrl-K, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E?

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

"[...] basic text manipulations like Ctrl-K, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E?"

I've been using computers almost literally forever, and I've never used or even heard of Ctrl+k and Ctrl+e.
So calling them "basic" is a bit of a stretch.
Ctrl+a = select all text

I honestly - I'm really not making this up - cannot find what Ctrl+k and Ctrl+e are supposed to do in the context of text editing.
Google isn't helping, Wikipedia doesn't list them.
And when I use them inside an editor (gedit) they appear to do nothing, not with text selected, not with no text selected, not when the cursor is at the beginning, middle or end of the line, it's doing nothing.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

So, tell me, what do Ctrl+k and Ctrl+e do?

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

They are bash shortcuts. https://www.ice2o.com/bash_quick_ref.html

And no, they are only worth knowing if you find yourself stuck without gui editors, as no one in their right mind gives a fuck about raw bash text manipulation.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the "HKJL" directional keys were mentioned ('vi') my guess is the comment refers to how those keys work as cursor movement shortcuts in Bash, they have for years ... http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/keyboard-shortcuts-for-bash-command-shell-for-ubuntu-debian-suse-redhat-linux-etc/

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

"They are bash shortcuts. https://www.ice2o.com/bash_quick_ref.html"

Ah, I see.
Thanks.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[BarbaraHudson]

I want Ctl-K-B, Ctl-K-E, Ctl-K-Y, Ctl-P-(insert next key as literal, inserts things like the escape key), etc. Wordstar keyboard shortcuts that also worked great in QuickEdit (qedit.com). Macros, ansi box graphics drawing mode, Multiple edit buffers for multiple files, all sorts of stuff. Borland's edtors also supported the same shortcuts. Fun times.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Gr8Apes]

Wordstar keyboard shortcuts

Hell, for years I just wanted a word processor that would actually print what I had specified on screen, no matter the printer. Fixed that issue by moving to non MS software across the boards.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[tomhath]

That depends on what program you're running. Wordstar? Bash? Nano? There is no One True Standard.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[jafiwam]

They are bash shortcuts. https://www.ice2o.com/bash_qui...

And no, they are only worth knowing if you find yourself stuck without gui editors, as no one in their right mind gives a fuck about raw bash text manipulation.

Actually, lots of people are starting to care to a much larger degree. The tools they are complaining about in TFA are used for keyboard navigation, screen readers, reader enhancers, etc. for disability ADA compliance. Non ADA compliance is going to be 2017's big boogyman issue to fix on the web.

The static toolbar at the top is one of the ways you can solve the "skip navigation" requirement for keyboard tabbing navigation and "No CSS" functionality. Put the div at the bottom of the code, and position it at the top and boom, you solve several compliance problems.

That said, the space bar is pretty useful for browsing and realistically what should happen is browsers should have a tool that lets you set the scroll distance yourself, and to set it customized by site. (Which, is already done with zoom factors.)

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs FTW!

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Dr. Evil]

They're what Mac users use because in the interest of ease-of-use, they have no home or end keys, but have two-extra modifier keys (Fn and Cmd). Ctrl-a => home (Windows), Ctrl-e => end, Ctrl-k => shift-end, delete.

Cmd-a => Ctrl-a.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

I think some of these keys derive from ancient Unix days. Jobs being reluctant to even put arrow keys on the Mac. They are basic and have been around forever, but only if you're a Mac user or ancient Unix guy.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[fph il quozientatore]

There is a shortcut for that, it's called "Print Screen".

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[MightyYar]

That's a fairly non-trivial problem. The old pricey way to solve it was to use an OS (or at least word processor) that rendered to the screen using Display Postscript and then also use a Postscript printer. The modern Macs and printers do a decent enough job by using something akin to PDF for display and raster printing. I assume the Adobe apps do something similar on Windows, but Word certainly does not and so you get different results in print than you do on the screen. What program do you use on Windows to get true WYSIWYG?

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[lgw]

Actually, the basic problem with Word is far simpler, and deeply, deeply stupid: Word doesn't set absolute margin sizes, instead it relies on the printer driver to tell Word the size of the page, then calculates the size remaining for text relative to that.

It's one of the more ridiculous and stupid design decisions ever made. Rounding errors in page sizes as reported from different printers cause the lines to wrap differently depending on your default printer. And since you can't even view a document without a printer, Word includes a fake printer driver. Of course, the fake printer driver is an actual driver, allowing for privilege escalation exploits. It's completely insane.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[mcswell]

For decades (since Win 3.1, I think), I've used a keyboard re-mapper in Windows that allows this kind of re-mapping. In my case, ctrl-h is the left cursor arrow, ctrl-a takes you to the beginning of the line, etc.--modeled after vi's keys, but ctrl keys rather than moded keys--so you never have to remove your fingers from the alphabetic part of the keyboard. If you're a touch typist, it's ideal. (It does have two modes, however: if you type ctrl-q, then all the cursor movement keys do selection.) This works in all apps in Windows, ranging from Firefox to Word to jEdit. (I've tried to re-write it for Linux, but so far with less than complete success). It's written in C, so it's completely programmable. I never understood why s.t. like this isn't bundled directly in to Windows or other OSs. And while the other keyboard remappers are ideal for things like remapping your keyboard for typing some foreign language, I haven't ever seen one that could re-map control keys to cursor keys.

Re: aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

In bash- and emacs-like contexts, ctrl-k usually deletes ('k'ills) the line from cursor to end of line (though some editors annoying kill the whole line regardless of column); ctrl-e usually jumps to end of line. ctrl-a jumps to start of line, contrasted with the MS convention of 'select all'.

Re: aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoy using Macs daily but wish Home and End meant what they do on a PC

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's a trip down memory lane: I haven't used those shortcuts since I was working on computers without arrow keys back in the early 80s. I'd show off by posting the ctrl sequences for next word etc but I can't actually recall them of the top of my head: the only ones I use regularly now are ctrl-a, c, x, and v.

I do remember that ctrl-g rang the bell, though sadly not on this computer.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of tradition, if browsers can respect the traditional space key, how about basic text manipulations like Ctrl-K, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E?

Because that would overload those bindings, since they are already following other traditions. CTRL-A is "Select All Text", and CTRL-K already functions as "focus the search widget" in Firefox and Chrome. (CTRL-E also functions as "focus the search widget" in Chrome for Windows and Linux, and Firefox for Windows but not Linux.)

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[yurikhan]

They work in bash, but it’s a bit ignorant to call them “bash shortcuts”. Rather, they are Emacs shortcuts.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

if browsers can respect

[My emphasis.]

This is the critical point. We should not be relying on website creators to follow a consistent design philosophy. On the contrary, website creators should be treated as nefarious entities who are trying to mess up the user's experience in every way up to and including installation of malware. It's the browsers that should be written for the benefit of the users, and they should do this by not permitting websites to hijack every mouse movement, keypress and battery status update.

I don't know how we got to this point, but I guess that either the browser-writers got in a contest with one another to see who could implement the most flashy, but least sensible features - or the standards bodies were co-opted by the website creators, and the browser-writers simply coded to the standards.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Gr8Apes]

That doesn't work for what we're talking about.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Gr8Apes]

You are only partially correct. It's not Word that's the problem, but Windows printer driver configuration being driven (originally) through the GDI interface. Instead of rasterizing a document based on what you configured in software, Windows delegates things like font descriptions to the underlying printer driver. Thus Helvetica as printed natively on an HP laserjet may be just slightly different than a Xerox laser jet, and definitely different than a Canon inkjet. Meanwhile, in the world of the rational drivers (pretty much anyone else in the computer space) in layman's terms, the OS/app combination formats and sends a page with instructions to the printer services, then sending the pages to the printer driver which needs to print the page as sent. This means switching printers doesn't alter what's printed, since the OS/app has already formatted said page. This doesn't mean that an app can't format a page to a specific printer, but it does mean that by default what it shows on the screen will remain what's printed as long as the app uses the OS printer services.

It's just another case of an area where windows falls woefully short of anything anyone would expect a computing system to do.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[cthulhu11]

I had no idea browsers would even emulate more(1) in this way. I've been scrolling via my trackpad for years.

Re:aka PgDn "trick"

[Anonymous Coward]

> They work in bash, but it’s a bit ignorant to call them “bash shortcuts”. Rather, they are Emacs shortcuts.

Is there a shortcut which is not used in Emacs?

Didn't you know?

[gustygolf]

Everybody uses the mouse to do the most basic things on computers these days. Including things like clicking the submit / "log in" button on forms and dialogs.

I wonder when the healthcare statistics start reflecting the higher incidence of RSI.

Re:Didn't you know?

[NotAPK]

A lot of web developers broke basic form functionality by writing their own submit handlers. These often deviate from accepted practices such as Enter for submit. You only have to lose form data once or twice before saying "fuck it" and always clicking the submit "button" (often just an image with an onClick hander) on all forms.

Re:Didn't you know?

[BarbaraHudson]

Even the original design of Windows was supposed to have keyboard shortcuts as the main way to interact with the environment and individual programs, with the mouse functions translated, depending on context, to the appropriate keyboard shortcuts in the main event loop.

Using the mouse to access menu functions, you'd see the keyboard shortcuts beside the desired operation (Print Ctl-P, Save-Ctl-S, etc) and quickly increase your speed. F*cking web developers screwed that paradigm up real good. Windows also screwed it up in later iterations.Now we're all screwed. Thanks, people, by dumbing shit down, you've just made everyone dumber, forcing them to work at the level of the lowest common denominator.

Re:Didn't you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the mouse to access menu functions, you'd see the keyboard shortcuts beside the desired operation (Print Ctl-P, Save-Ctl-S, etc) and quickly increase your speed... Windows also screwed it up in later iterations.

How is it screwed-up? Keyboard shortcuts are still well-supported through Win10. Of all the reasons to hate later versions of Windows, lack of keyboard shortcut support is not one of them. Perhaps third-party applications are at fault, particularly since the industry likes to put programmers out to pasture before they are old enough to rent a car.

Re:Didn't you know?

[mrbester]

Enter for form submit, in the way you mean, is only an "accepted practice" because Microsoft made it the behaviour in Internet Explorer even when the button didn't have focus and other browser makers followed suit. Before that, people tabbed to the button and *then* pressed Enter or used a mouse to click it. So all the form details being lost by an incorrectly caught key press is not the web developers fault but Microsoft's and whatever fucking lazy "focus group" they used.

Re:Didn't you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck trolling horseshit are you babbling? Windows has supported the exact same shortcuts for 20+ years. You literally have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:Didn't you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android's accepted practice is "submit after filling a text field", it seems.

While handy, have they never run across a form that has multiple fillable text fields?

Re:Didn't you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, Windows 8 broke a number of the old shortcuts. It's one of the reasons I'm still on 7.

Re:Didn't you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

vimfx, vimium, vimperator, etc exist for a reason.

Re:Didn't you know?

[DogDude]

Enter for form submit, in the way you mean, is only an "accepted practice" because Microsoft made it the behaviour in Internet Explorer even when the button didn't have focus and other browser makers followed suit.

I don't think that's true. I seem to remember Mosaic doing it waaaay back when.

Re:Didn't you know?

[lgw]

Why do you think the key is called "Enter" to begin with? Think about it. It was the key that entered (submitted) form data. That's what the key meant for 30+ years before the PC (let alone the mouse) was invented. "Return" was a different key entirely, one that took the same action as a carriage return on a typewriter (and sometimes labeled with the down-and-right arrow).

The real mistake was combining the functions of these two, distinct keys in the early PC days - at the time, terminal keyboards still did it right. Then a bunch of kids re-invented form submission, ignoring decades of best practices in usability.

Enter for form submission was the standard and the correct standard since before you were born. That's what the name of the key means ffs. Now get off my lawn!

Re:Didn't you know?

[lgw]

You can no longer discover the keyboard shortcuts in Windows. Discoverability is the victim in the latest user-hostile UI fads.

Re:Didn't you know?

[BarbaraHudson]

Really? Then how come, when the original spec was that everything could be done with only a keyboard, do we now require a mouse for so much? Try dragging the toolbar from the bottom to the top without a mouse. Ain't so easy after all.

Re:Didn't you know?

[CrashNBrn]

Seems to work just fine on my touch-screen. The only thing that *requires* a mouse|trackpad|pointer is "Drag and Drop".

Re:Didn't you know?

[BarbaraHudson]

Follow the thread. It says that originally everything was supposed to be accomplished using only a keyboard, for those computers that didn't have a mouse or other pointing device. Your touch screen is NOT a keyboard.

Re:Didn't you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

You only have to lose form data once or twice before saying "fuck it"

Not defending anything, but you/everyone should have this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-recovery/

Re:Didn't you know?

[NotAPK]

Thanks, that's great.

In case anyone else is wondering, that add on is compatible with Pale Moon, and it encrypts the form content that it saves. So far seems rather nice.

Re:Didn't you know?

[yurikhan]

If you don’t have a pointing device, the only thing you need about toolbars is a way to hide them, and that’s what the View menu is for.

Re:Didn't you know?

[BarbaraHudson]

There's no hotkey to bring up the show/hide taskbar dialog. You need to install an add-on to do that.

Re:Didn't you know?

[Bratch]

Mine is labeled with the down-and-LEFT arrow.

Fix this by modifying the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never want a persistent toolbar because pressing "Home" to access the top of the page isn't hard.

The good news is that you could fix this nonsense with a browser that renders in an infinite height buffer and lets you scroll through that without informing the webpage where you are in the page. Still waiting for that browser though.

Re:Fix this by modifying the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would break sites that dynamically load more entries, instead of paginating, when scrolling to the bottom. Which would be very very good, because I've never seen an implementation that wasn't horrifically slow and brittle, but only if the browser became popular enough.

Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea you could use the spacebar to do this.

Perhaps

[Hognoxious]

Perhaps he should check sites for whether, when you follow a link and return, it takes you back to where you were or to the top of the page.

Re: Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

Or sites that don't support "open on new tab" on things that should work as links

But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[wet-socks]

...and isn't that the platform every website is targetting now?

Re:But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

You act as if platforms dictate websites, but why not the opposite? If every website made PgDn useful, then mobile phone makers would add a PgDn gesture.

Re:But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[KiloByte]

On a site like Facebook that has an IQ cap, that's a reasonable remark. Non-toy phones, though, do have a physical space key.

Re: But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only phones I've seen with a physical space key are those Playskool-type phones that have a physical keyboard.

Re:But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[MightyYar]

Well, that comment was a blast from the past.

Re: But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you need to get out more.

Re:But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[KiloByte]

Well, N900 is ancient but there's still no upgrade. Neo900 is expensive almost-same-spec vapourware (it gets you 512MB instead of 256MB memory, slightly better CPU and that's it, for $750 when you can get an used N900 for $25), Pyra is ridiculously thick vapourware (new phones are way too thin, Pyra goes the other extreme), Minotaur One looks more reasonable than Pyra but is even more vaporous. Both of these don't pretend to be phones, I think N900's thickness is about the sweet spot.

Nokia's default keymapping was downright retarded -- to get most symbols, you had to press a key combination to pull an on-screen menu then you had to click the symbol; the obvious solution is to assign shift-or-fn combinations to all keys, there's enough of them to cover all of ASCII.

Re:But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Phones bought by morons, though, do have a physical space key.

Fixed that for you.

Re:But there's no spacebar on a mobile phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can get it (which is not easy now) the Jolla phone with TOHKBD (physical keyboard addon) is an excellent replacement for the N900. The keyboard do have slight problems sometimes registering keypresses, probably due to crap on the pins (it's detachable), but is otherwise a much, much better keyboard then the one N900 had.

Too bad Jolla seem to struggle to survive, I really hope there is a long term sustainable niche for them.

It’s like they want you to use ad blockers

[borad]

So you ban the floating section that screws up scrolling (this is not a Space versus PageDown debate, ya dills) and then, hell, get rid of a stack of other stuff too.

browser's job?

[Anonymous Coward]

shouldn't it be the browser's responsibility?

Re:browser's job?

[Luthair]

No, because the browser doesn't know what the point of that fixed element is. The browser also can't help if the sites author is a complete fucking idiot and isn't using the native scrollbar.

Re: browser's job?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it scrolls one screen by default. If a developer chooses to mask the screen with their menu, isn't it the developers job to code the new correct behavior or disable space to scroll ?

Re:browser's job?

[tepples]

If a fixed element is positioned at the very top or bottom and more than half the width of the body, the browser can use a heuristic to determine that it's a navigation bar whose height should be excluded from the viewport height for page scrolling calculation.

Some sites default to a text field

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as google.com so this won't work all the time

browser's job?

[Anonymous Coward]

shouldn't it be the browser's responsibility to handle how much to scroll?

That'll bother the 8 people still using Macs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Twenty years to get a second mouse button, and the snowflakes still don't have easily accessible Pig Up / Pig Down keys.

Also, the browser is a client-side rendering engine. If you want to reserve the space bar for something, that's a local job. The web site designer can only make suggestions. Only in the apple of Jobs' eye must everything be the same to suit one preference.

Good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Since i hate it when sites scroll when i unintentionally hit the space bar. This is a good thing?

As a developer.

[jellomizer]

1. Is this spacebar scroll part of the HTML standards? or is it just something the browser does as a feature?
2. Web and HTML isn't the same beast it was 20+ years ago. It is considered more of a thin-client interface protocol then a document reader. Much like many standards that came into play. It may not be the best technology for the job. But it is something that everyone has available. Unlike say XWindows Server, VNC, Remote Desktop, or SSH client... Nearly every modern computer has a browser. and Web hosted apps solve the problem of complex deployments where trying to keep all the users up to date is nearly impossible. The idea of scrolling down big documents are less of an issue and more of an application method.
3. The keyboard is not a widely used technology for navigation. Most people use the pointer device and most have a scroll wheel or some equivalent scrolling gesture to them.
4. The Page down is a Jarring UI experience. This was originally done due to system performance. As the resources needed to animate scrolling was high. As well it was easier to cache in memory. Most people don't read with the page down. They may use it only as a faster way to get to the bottom.

When the Web was released keyboards with a LOT of extra keys were popular, and they were some systems sold without pointer devices. However today most browsing folks do not have a physical keyboard now. Trying to make sure your web site/web application supports all those crazy keystrokes they did doesn't make much sense. And would require much more effort than to appease some old guys habits.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's kind of bullshit. You can keep the keyboard features without sacrifying your precious tablet/phone crap. You are just being lazy.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Scrolling by a page isn't a "crazy keystroke", you dolt.

Re: As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a developer and are asking these questions?

You must be an American. My Indian devs know this shit.

offshoring for the win!

Re:As a developer.

[ckatko]

I'm calling bullshits on your entire comment until you provide a citation for "Jarring UI experience."

Re:As a developer.

[Orgasmatron]

"Jarring UI experience"?

Seriously? When I ask for the next page, it is because I WANT TO READ THE NEXT PAGE, and not because I want to see how clever the scrolling animation is.

Also, key scrolling is a local browser function. Whether it is space or page down or META+wheel on the mouse or shaking your phone in just the right way, the browser is just jumping down the buffer a bit.

The problem is that the HTML specs provide a way to float crap on top, and ways to pin it to the top or bottom of the page, and also a hint to the browser that indicates how much reading space is covered by the crap, so that the browser knows how far to jump per page request. Lots of websites have the floaty crap, without the hint.

That's all that needs to happen. Web designers need to provide the height of the crap they are cluttering the page with, and they aren't. They aren't being asked to write special javascript to jump properly, they aren't being asked to write keyboard drivers, or layout engines. Just to include a hint about how much of the reading space their floaty crap is obscuring.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

If fixing the problem is so easy, then why didn't Pogue bother to tell us how to do it? When these 18 big websites and countless of smaller websites each independently looks for a solution, then a few of them are bound to miss the simple solution and write special javascript.

Re:As a developer.

[BarbaraHudson]

Web and HTML isn't the same beast it was 20+ years ago. It is considered more of a thin-client interface protocol then a document reader.

No, it was considered a document reader, period. How it rendered the documents was entirely up to the client, but only basic content such as text and (some) images were supported - very poorly. It was for reading documents, including plaintext. The servers would serve up documents, in either plaintext or html. HTML was a type of document, not a protocol. The protocol was http: or file: for local files (which never required the "web"), HTML was a document standard, not protocol.

On a side note, the standard was f*cked from the beginning, and even Berniers-Lee now admits he made a mistake. The TLD should have been after the protocol spec and before the rest of the url, - http://org.slashdot.index.html... instead of http://slashdot.org/index.html. There were a lot of other stupidities in the spec as well, soch as calling a link an anchor tag. How stupid and counter-intuitive is this? No, it was copnsidered a document reader.

Re:As a developer.

[The MAZZTer]

1. When all browsers do it, and it's not a standard, should you ignore it? I would say no. From a developer's perspective, you should reasonably try to support these things. This could also potentially be an accessibility issue... if the browser sees a page of content as different than how your web page sees it, I suppose there could be some sort of issue there.

2. OK, but the space bar scroll hasn't changed in that time.

3. You can scroll by page with the mouse by clicking on the scrollbar track. It's not just the keyboard that can do it.

4. I still find when scrolling through very large documents it's far easier on me to scroll by a page at a time to navigate faster.

Re:As a developer.

[vyvepe]

4. The Page down is a Jarring UI experience.

Surely, you must joking here. PgUp/PgDn are useful buttons and they ought to work right.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I give up, my Google Foo is not strong enough. What is this "hint" and how do I set it?

Re:As a developer.

[drew_kime]

Same here, I'm not familiar with the hint.

Re: As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Different person, but depending on the device, and program, I've seen jarring implementations of page scrolls/page flip/text advance.

It's a weird redraw that leaves me unsure if it's the right page or not.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fixing the problem means that they have to dive into 500 KB of minified JavaScript and 400 KB of bloated ajax-filled HTML.

It's not easy. For a third party who has no clue how their code is structured.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

You claim to be a developer but appear to have never heard of accessibility? Hint: there are people out there who can't use a mouse (blind, etc.) and aren't using a mobile device. Nice job of totally generalizing like an insensitive douche.

Re:As a developer.

[StyXman]

The problem is that the HTML specs provide a way to float crap on top, and ways to pin it to the top or bottom of the page, and also a hint to the browser that indicates how much reading space is covered by the crap, so that the browser knows how far to jump per page request. Lots of websites have the floaty crap, without the hint.

I found a solution this weekend: just disable CSS. Pages are readable again, besides the catastrophic breakdown of design, but articles... man, articles are text and images again. And space/PgDown scrollable.

Re:As a developer.

[WaffleMonster]

The keyboard is not a widely used technology for navigation. Most people use the pointer device and most have a scroll wheel or some equivalent scrolling gesture to them.

It's essential for web applications the same people will be depending on every day to get their jobs done. I never design systems without keyboard navigation.

Trying to make sure your web site/web application supports all those crazy keystrokes they did doesn't make much sense. And would require much more effort than to appease some old guys habits.

The only metric I care about is productivity. "Doesn't make much sense" and "appease some old guys habits" convey no objectively useful information.

I can get to any screen I want from anywhere instantly without looking at the screen and without navigation aids even being visible. This provides ability to navigate faster and improve my productivity v. exclusively touch screen / mouse usage. Those who chose not to learn keyboard navigation consistently underperform those who take the initiative to learn.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. I'm pretty confident it does not exist.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

My limited knowledge of CSS tells me: overflow scroll and correct padding values (size of header/footer/sidebar) on the content container.

Re:As a developer.

[jellomizer]

Some say it is being lazy others saying you are meeting your deadline.
Real world development you don't have time to make it perfect.

Re:As a developer.

[jdavidb]

Space bar is not a crazy keystroke and has nothing to do with HTML standards. I would seriously fire a web developer who spoke like this.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fixing the problem is easy: never use fixed position elements. Done.

Oh, you wanted to fix the problem AND have fixed stuff covering the top of the page? Well, I'm pretty sure even jquery doesn't provide a cut-and-paste way to .scrollIntoView(visible_below_the_fixed_position_shit_at_the_top_of_the_page). You could probably do it by capturing the spacebar press, letting the browser go one page forward, then subtract (height_of_fixed_shit) from scrollTop so you go 200 pixels back or whatever.

Re:As a developer.

[radio4fan]

The problem is that the HTML specs provide a way to float crap on top, and ways to pin it to the top or bottom of the page, and also a hint to the browser that indicates how much reading space is covered by the crap

Could you provide a link to the part of the HTML specs which detail this 'hint'?

Thanks in advance.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize there was such a thing, and when I read the summary, I just had to check my own site for the problem. Space bar scrolling works fine, so apparently I did it right.

The only thing I recall having done is put a margin-top on the body element with the size of the top bar. I don't know if that's the hint he's talking about.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

The TLD should have been after the protocol spec and before the rest of the url

So, opposite of the way DNS writes host names. What would be the point of that? To make it harder to code something like the following?

"http://" + hostname + path

Re:As a developer.

[BarbaraHudson]

You completely forgot the tld in your example.

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like most of the replies here suggest, it seems that such a thing does not actually exist in the current HTML specs. (It would have been just swell if TFA made any mention of how to achieve this, but alas.)

However, I think that Firefox and Chrome use a trick to achieve the effect that this article is talking about: If a position:fixed element is set to top:0, then the height of that element is subtracted from the height that the body is scrolled for a page up/down. In other words, the "correct" page length is scrolled if an element is overlapping the top of the webpage, but only under certain conditions.

This works without Javascript; try visiting nytimes.com on a non-mobile device without enabling any permissions in NoScript in Firefox. You'll see the top-fixed masthead, and you'll also see that the page scrolls a "proper" length. If you try modifying the "header" element to use top:1 instead of top:0, you'll see that the amount scrolled changes (and it becomes a problem as outlined in TFA).

This doesn't work if the height of the fixed element is more than 40% (?) of the body, at least in Firefox. It also might not work if the width of the element is less than a certain percentage of the viewport. I also don't know about IE or Edge because I'm not a True Web Designer so I choose not to care. But there does seem to be some sort of "acknowledgement" on the part of the browser that the scroll length should be different than 90% of the viewport height.

It's probably some browser-specific algorithm that a web designer has no control over.

I suppose that's the upshot of TFA: The HTML spec should have a property that suggests how much height should be subtracted from the page scroll length of an element. (Bonus points if the spec supports a negative value; wouldn't that be fun.)

Re:As a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most web content is documents, not apps. Lots of long texts. I don't know a mouse gesture that scrolls by exactly one visible screen. Your basis for decisions "as a developer" seems to be your personal preference/prejudice, not data. And you just assume everybody is able to use a pointing device.

Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[cycler]

Well, the fact that some of the text gets obscured by a toolbar isn't the problem.

The real issue IS all the toolbars that remain in place when you are scrolling.
Who ever thought it was a good idea to steal my vertical pixels should be shot at dawn.

Even with Full HD screen there is still LESS vertical pixels than what I had 15 years ago on an old 21" 1600x1200 CRT.
"Progress" my as.

Seriously, could someone in web design please explain WHY keeping a toolbar on the top is a good idea?

/C

Re: Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us are forced to work for employers who get pissed when they have to routinely scroll down to read content, and then scroll up to have to get to the controls located with said toolbar to navigate to other content? Of course you can, in many cases, press the HOME key or a similar construct, to rapidly return to the top, but that breaks on tablets, which we were also told top design for.

That, and the fact that many, many UIs on desktops - including Windows and Mac - anchor a menu bar to the top of the screen, and you get a client base that's fixed in their ways and expects certain design principles in their paid for product.

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have in a past career done a lot of profiling on various sites where people clicked, how often they scrolled, and so on. Just basic telemetry.
And it turned out people don't actually use all the toolbars and sidebars all that much. Certainly not enough to justify their existence.
I think ‘position: fixed’ should never have been added to CSS. It was a bad idea at the time and it still is.

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[UnknownSoldier]

> Seriously, could someone in web design please explain WHY keeping a toolbar on the top is a good idea?

Graphics Guru here. (I've been programming graphics and doing UI design since the mid 80's)

I used one for the first time on one of my web pages a few months ago where I show the Section name, Page Number, and other misc info -- some which is clickable to navigate to a different section. Basically a "sticky floating header." I also have an option where the viewer can toggle color on/off (since I use color highlighting to show categories.)

I have mixed opinions about this:

* (+) It looks sexy as hell so I can understand why people want to use it. As you scroll the page up the last section you come across "sticks" to the top of the screen until the next one. It helps "anchor" the reader by showing them useful information relevant for the current section.
* (-) Calculating where to scroll now needs to be intercepted / adjusted to account for the sticky header height.
* (+/-) If used the ancient iFrame that would solve the scrolling calculation problem but I lose the graceful "scroll up into fixed place".
* (-) I hate the fact that I'm losing vertical space which is already at a premium.
* (-) Treating it as a "sticky footer" solves the scrolling calculation problem, but it just looks weird as the reader is mis-led into believing what the "next" section is, not the "current" section.
* (-) I really wish there was an option to auto-hide it -- but that has it own's problems. What triggers it? That forces the reader to press a key or move their mouse to make it visible. UGH.

With all the problems it creates I'm not convinced the sticky header is the right solution -- it has a limited usefulness. It definitely should be used sparingly, but I lament that there really are no good alternatives.

i.e. Form without Function is useless visual vomit.

Unfortunately too may UI / UX "experts" get dazzled by the "bling" forgetting WHY people are reading in the first place. i.e. They want to solve a task: either linear reading, or non-linear navigation.

This is why I constantly asked myself 4 questions when I was deploying it:

* What purpose does this sticky header server?
* What problem does it solve?
* Does it create more problems then it solves?
* What are the alternatives?

Good design is almost always a trade off. :-/

The problem modern Web designers don't know what the fuck they are doing anymore. They don't understand the _context_ of the problem that has been "solved" for 20 years. Instead they want to dumb their UI down to tablet / phone standards tossing out all the UI advantages that people have come to expect as standard behavior. UI has become a "lowest common denominator" -- the worst of everything. Even worse these UX designers think they are doing god's work unwilling to listen to feedback on all the dumb shit they are doing, unable to learn.

This current fad of "flat design" is one such idiocracy. Instead of empower the view to use different colors to help distinguish icons you force them to decode similar monochromatic silhouettes. *face palm*.

It is good someone is starting to call out these dumb web designers.

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[coastwalker]

Ha ha, did you not get the memo saying that all devices were to be used to watch advertising video in the standard wide screen format. Moron you have no idea how to give your money to big corporations.

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[mcswell]

"Who ever thought it was a good idea to steal my vertical pixels should be shot at dawn." I don't understand, why wait?

Re: Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[Anonymous Coward]

FEWER not LESS pixels

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[oakgrove]

I have a Greasemonkey script that works wonders in this situation. Any site with annoying toolbars gets added to the list in the script and "position:fixed" is gone!

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[Anonymous Coward]

position: sticky may solve some of the issues when it gets implemented. Otherwise, consider putting the navigation to the side when on wide screens - or rather, wide windows, in case the user has multiple lined up horizontally.

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good design is almost always a trade off. :-/

The problem modern Web designers don't know what the fuck they are doing anymore. They don't understand the _context_ of the problem that has been "solved" for 20 years. Instead they want to dumb their UI down to tablet / phone standards tossing out all the UI advantages that people have come to expect as standard behavior. UI has become a "lowest common denominator" -- the worst of everything. Even worse these UX designers think they are doing god's work unwilling to listen to feedback on all the dumb shit they are doing, unable to learn.

This current fad of "flat design" is one such idiocracy. Instead of empower the view to use different colors to help distinguish icons you force them to decode similar monochromatic silhouettes. *face palm*.

It is good someone is starting to call out these dumb web designers.

I think menus should be on the server side, implemented by a common protocol/specification. That would allow consistency/uniformity. and more real-estate. Menus are functional objects and should not be elements of art. Spare the menus your design.

Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem modern Web designers don't know what the fuck they are doing anymore.

That's because nobody wants to pay for good web design anymore. There's this notion that you could hire some kid or some offshore coder to do "just a webpage" for cheap so if you're paying anything more than peanuts you're being ripped off. Of course, as with most things in life, you get what you pay for and that's why most of the web these days is pure cookie cutter crap.

How about the Back button?

[tomhath]

I scroll through pages with the mouse wheel. I also have the middle button (wheel) set to Browser Back. It's really annoying these days that the most frequently used button in a browser is so often broken.

Re:How about the Back button?

[Luthair]

The author of that page is wrong as fuck.

• People do not expect the lightbox to be part of their back stack, the understand it as part of the page they are viewing.
• Filtering - it depends on the page behaviour, if most of the page doesn't reload and its snappy then the expectation is different than if everything jumps around.

Re:How about the Back button?

[BarbaraHudson]

And yet it still breaks the back button, because people DO expect only an overlay that suddenly popped up after the page was rendered to disappear when they click the back button, not the whole damn page.

Mind you, any site that pops up an overlay that blocks what I'm trying to read with something like "give us your email address to receive blah blah blah", I'm quite happy to leave anyway. I'd label such cases as BROKEN_DO_NOT_FIX.

Re:How about the Back button?

[tomhath]

He's not wrong. Read what he wrote:

The short version: users expect the back button to take them back to what they perceived to be their previous page. The notion of perception is the key factor here, since there’s often a difference between what is technically a new page and what users perceive to be a new page – which can create discrepancies between where the user expects the back button to take them and where it actually takes them.

People expect Back to take them back. Anything else is broken. If the framework you use has implemented it wrong, your framework is broken.

Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge fonts, toolbars, mystery hamburger navigation and goddamn parallax scrolling.

Re:Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything

[antdude]

Yep, why can't we separate mobile and desktop viewers? I was OK with this! Argh.

Re:Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything

[tepples]

Say you have a 12" tablet and a 10" laptop. Which is the "desktop computer" and which the "mobile device"?

You appear to recommend the use of a separate m.-site. If a phone user shares a link through e-mail, Usenet, or more recent web-based substitutes for the above (forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) with a desktop user, which version should the recipient see?

Re:Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this; give the user an easy-to-use function that forces the page to load the mobile or desktop version on a site-by-site basis. I use mobile versions of sites due to them loading faster, and on my tablet I sometimes use the desktop version. But like an austistic child having a meltdown, they refuse to listen when I say "Give me THIS version of the page, don't backtalk me".

Re:Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you have a 12" tablet and a 10" laptop. Which is the "desktop computer" and which the "mobile device"?

In my experience, many sites go by number of pixels.

E.g. when I'm on my desktop PC, running 1920x1080 with a non-maximized browser window, I get the mobile version. Where as on my 1920x1200 tablet, I get the desktop version.

Re:Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything

[tepples]

How about this; give the user an easy-to-use function that forces the page to load the mobile or desktop version on a site-by-site basis.

Good luck designing such "an easy-to use function", especially when such a large percentage of the population can't perform even the simplest tasks on a computer.

Spot the jumping!

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought it was more of an annoyance that when I accidentally hit the space bar the webpage would jump and throw me off! Didn't know "it was a feature".
I read mostly in the middle of my screen and use the mouse to scroll as I read.

I always scroll with the mouse

[reboot246]

Scrolling isn't a problem. There are a lot of ways to scroll.

What IS a problem is damned hover menus. They should be banned from the universe.

Re:I always scroll with the mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the latest thing - mandatory scroll-through ads? Instead of scrolling through the page content, scrolling brings an ad from the bottom of the page, then passes it through your field of view, then up past you, and then you are allowed to scroll again. Murderous rage is a reasonable response.

The only exception to my disgust at having products jammed even farther down my throat than usual was a Disney ad which made their ad a "window" into disneyland - so as you scrolled, the picture changed moved through their little frame. That was creative and really cool. It also wasn't intrusive - it got my attention without insulting me or obstructing my view.

Re:I always scroll with the mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the latest thing - mandatory scroll-through ads? Instead of scrolling through the page content, scrolling brings an ad from the bottom of the page, then passes it through your field of view, then up past you, and then you are allowed to scroll again. Murderous rage is a reasonable response.

Was that an ad for an ad-blocker? Because it sounds like that's what it would be most likely to sell.

override

[Anonymous Coward]

for browser specific and define how you want !!!!!cs

Infinite Scrolling

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else here who hates infinite scrolling?

Alternatively: Anyone else here annoyed that the function of HTML-Anchors is broken by JavaScript inserting Text after the page has already been rendered?

Re:Infinite Scrolling

[BarbaraHudson]

Infinite scrolling: That's just millennials doing this crap, following "Buzz Lightyear - To Infinity and Beyond". I've seen sites that, whenever you try to click on one of the links in the footer, the footer just scrolls away before you can. Retards.

Re:Infinite Scrolling

[colinrichardday]

Is infinite scrolling where you think you're approaching the bottom of a page and then more page gets added? Yes, I can't stand it. And I also find inserting text after rendering to be annoying.

David Pogue

[Anonymous Coward]

Is being called out by David Pogue going to shame anyone?

Re:David Pogue

[BarbaraHudson]

Is being called out by David Pogue going to shame anyone?

Only if enough of us express our discontent. And maybe email the culprits a few links, such as to this discussion and the original article.

It's part of the Web 3.0 trend

[QuietLagoon]

Web 3.0 - design websites that make the hipster website designers happy, but are less than usable for the people who want to read them. Web 3.0 has a wealth of special features including, but not limited, to:
.

- low contrast text. The lower the contrast the better. The goal is text that is all but unreadable for a pair of 20-year-old eyeballs.

- expected functionality of the webpage UI is sabotaged. Make sure that "space bar to scroll down a page" continues to work, but works incorrectly

- lots of meaningless images and whitespace, with little actual content per page

Re:It's part of the Web 3.0 trend

[asylumx]

Don't forget the parallax scrolling!

Re:It's part of the Web 3.0 trend

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

- low contrast text. The lower the contrast the better. The goal is text that is all but unreadable for a pair of 20-year-old eyeballs.

^^^^ THIS.

Also include:

- weirdo color schemes like soft-pink text on a gray background, yellow on gray, pink on white, etc etc
- super-tiny font size,
- page elements that zoom in and out, bounce, or elastically jitter or shake for no reason,
- form elements that are basically invisible until you click into them (i.e. no outlines so you can't tell that they're for elements)
- custom JS-rendered form elements that don't work in some browsers or mobile devices and/or can't be accessed using the keyboard
- numbnut designers who use radio buttons as checkboxes. WTF were you thinking??

There's more, but I gotta go yell at some kids to get off my lawn. And hey, where's my belt with the onion on it?

Re:It's part of the Web 3.0 trend

[Anonymous Coward]

- page elements that zoom in and out, bounce, or elastically jitter or shake for no reason,
>

- videos that follow you when you scroll past them.
- videos that automatically pop-up and play when you scroll to them.

Fuck off with the Headers and Footers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Websites with permanent headers/footers are simply a UI/UX design fuckup.

Stop wasting my screens vertical space (especially since everybody has a widescreen monitor these days...), and then scrunching all the article text into a sliver in the center of the page (completely wasting most of the horizontal screen space..) - so that you can make me scroll by more fucking ads to the side (which I won't see anyway, because of my ad-blocker...).

Re:It’s like they want you to use ad blocker

[BarbaraHudson]

Get rid of css, problem solved. The web is not supposed to be like print media, where layout is king.

New title for this

[geekmux]

"Unknown Person Attempts to Shame the internet for Not Implementing Pointless Shortcut"

Needless to say there's no fucking space bar on mobile hardware, but apparently there is out on his lawn...

Re:New title for this

[Sigma 7]

"Unknown Person Attempts to Shame the internet for Not Implementing Pointless Shortcut"

Back in ~1995, any major application that failed to provide a PgDn mechanism would be the laughing stock everywhere.

It's technically optional to have the Spacebar do this, but the feature itself is never optional.

Needless to say there's no fucking space bar on mobile hardware

Something which isn't required for mobile devices because the user can trivially finger scroll that works as page down: Put the finger at the bottom of the screen, then move the finger to the top.

Re:New title for this

[Misagon]

There is actually a touch-screen gesture that should be equivalent to a single press on the Page Down key: a short flick of the finger. Android actually does this wrong as it scrolls different distances depending on subtle variations of your finger speed.
There are also tablets whose primary function is an e-reader where there also physical buttons specifically for moving to the next/previous page.

Re:New title for this

[geekmux]

"Unknown Person Attempts to Shame the internet for Not Implementing Pointless Shortcut"

Back in ~1995, any major application that failed to provide a PgDn mechanism would be the laughing stock everywhere.

It's technically optional to have the Spacebar do this, but the feature itself is never optional.

Anyone plugging in a modem to dial-up to the internet today would be the laughing stock everywhere. In other words, it's not 1995 anymore, and based on the number of people who even know this feature exists I'd say it's pretty optional, and likely irrelevant.

Needless to say there's no fucking space bar on mobile hardware

Something which isn't required for mobile devices because the user can trivially finger scroll that works as page down: Put the finger at the bottom of the screen, then move the finger to the top.

My point was more centered around the fact that mobile is becoming the dominant interface to the internet, which is all the more reason this outdated feature is irrelevant, much like the dial-up modem.

Re:New title for this

[tepples]

"becoming the dominant interface" doesn't imply nearly the same usage share disparity as fiber+cable+DSL+satellite+cellular compared to dial-up.

Re:Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Yorker, and Scientific American are all really ashamed now that their improper scrolling has been revealed.

I'm not sure who the bigger idiot is here. Slashdot or some self-appointed expert who nobody gives a shit about, ranting about a feature that 98% of Internet users don't know or care about.

The scourges of the WWW, in chronological order

[catmistake]

There is necessarily some overlap to these plagues

1) AOL (1990's Internet gateway confused with the actual Internet)
2) hotmail/msn
3) spam/malware
4) Penguinistas (from the advent of Linux until Linux became a stable and mature OS, c. 2004/6; subsequently, for the most part, it's all good, ignoring the systemd pimple)
4) Adobe Flash
5) poorly implemented Javascript (still continues, never ends)
6) Apple and the development and ubiquity of the iOS-dominated mobile web (this ruined nearly everything for mobile device power-users)
7) unrestrained web developers and site feature creep, KISS is replaced with incomprehensible complexity (slow steady march to WWW apocalypse)

WWW/Internet never needed any of these things. Some of them started out innocuously enough, and turned evil (like Flash), and some started out evil and turned to goodness (such as Linux and it's irrational popularity prior to become mature and stable).

What will be the next scourge of the Internet?

Re:The scourges of the WWW, in chronological order

[ortholattice]

8) Hidden menus and mystery meat.

Google Maps is the prototype example. In the first or second iterations some years ago, Google Maps was very nice. Menus and functions used to be obvious and intuitive. They've hidden more and more things behind cryptic icons or that only show up on mouseover. I'm sure I could read up on it and figure it all out, but I use it so rarely that it's not worth my effort. Alternatives such as Mapquest are easier to use, and for occasional things like printing directions they're adequate (although Mapquest is also moving in the Google direction).

Just 2 days ago I needed some custom directions, because a road where I wanted to go was closed by construction making the GPS useless. I tried to use Google maps and futzed around until I sort of had the route I wanted on the screen, but when I tried to print only a small portion was shown and the rest chopped off. By trial and error, I kept zooming out until it fit the printer page, but then the street names became suppressed because I zoomed out too far. After about 10 minutes I gave up and used Mapquest.

(I now remember that the previous time I used Google Maps a few months ago I also gave up on printing directly and instead captured a screen shot and printed that! I forgot about that trick 2 days ago.)

And while I'm on a Google rant, they used to have links to to translate, books, etc. on the main page, and now there's nothing. I have no idea how people find these anymore (I have bookmarks for them). Well, I guess they can Google for "Google translate", but you have to know that it even exists before you can do that.

Re:The scourges of the WWW, in chronological order

[jhecht]

You're missing sites that show mobile versions on desktops/laptops and vice versa. It's either headline type across a 21-inch screen or microtype on a mobile.

Re:The scourges of the WWW, in chronological order

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a really weird jab at Linux. It was "irrationally" popular in the beginning because people (other than you) saw its potential. Also, how did that make it "evil"?

Re:The scourges of the WWW, in chronological order

[Anonymous Coward]

List fail. You missed Internet Explorer 6.0.

"Subscribe now!" overlays

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're at it, FUCK YOU for not letting me hit Escape to dismiss your stupid overlays. I'll take "signs your web designer doesn't know any keyboard shortcuts for $800", Alex.

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological orde

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you deliberately leave off Internets Explorer 6 thru 11?

Pet peeve

[Anonymous Coward]

My favourite pet peeve is inconsistent input field focus behaviour; e.g. clicking into the URL bar of most browsers selects everything - contrary to most but not all input fields. As a result, you always have to check before typing or double/tripple clicking to select a word/all. I don't care which behaviour is used either, I just want it to be uniform so I don't have to check what happens each time.
Similar issue with double click to select a word using different word boundary criteria across applications - or in case of spectacular failures like netbeans, even across different file types.

Re:Pet peeve

[Anonymous Coward]

It amazes me that there are still people who don't know about triple-clicking to select text. This is endlessly annoying when people fail to format links correctly to take advantage of it (eg link on one line, title/description/etc on another line before or after it)

Fuck spacebar-scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck spacebar-scroll. Use the god damn page down button like a sensible person. Same goes for backspace, and shift+backspace. (or now the even more ridiculous alt+ left/right in some cases)
Keyboards should have come with Back and Forward from the beginning.

Back and Forward are such semantically important keys for so many programs that browse in some way, be it video and audio players, browsers, file managers, tabbed editors and such. It's ridiculous that it was never included.
Stupid insert shouldn't have been its own key. Delete should have been shift+backspace only. (yes, try it)
Home and end next to page up, Back and forward next to page down. Elegant, beautiful.
Insert can go... the fuck away in to the distance for being a shit key. Always disabled it. Never have I used it. Overwrite has never been implemented in a good way. Even in Excel which is about the only decent software Microsoft have ever made in their history.
What the fuck did Insert and Delete have to do with NAVIGATION in the first place? Stupid waste keys taking space up in the navigation section.

Even web standards were in place for Left and Right, as well as Up, for page and directory browsing.
Opera was like the only browser that supported this feature I think. Let you tag a link for Last and Next, its parent directory (be it shopping category, forum, files or whatever), and some others. Made browsing a dream. Only way to replicate it is by smart scanning of URLs after a few pages, or by manually hardcoding how URL parameters work.
Scroll lock plus arrow keys to page navigate would have been ideal, then off for scrollbars or caret. At least scrolling a page (mostly!) doesn't break it, unlike accidental backspaces.

I can't count how many times I have annoyingly hit backspace outside a form and undone everything, or just went back and was annoyed because it meant finding a place in a video again, or place in the page if reading something large. (it was even worse in the 56k days, holy FUCK)
I can't count the times I have tried to use backspace to go back because I never use the damn thing for that. I use the Back button like a sensible person.

Get off my damn lawn. It was always a bad idea. It was never a good idea in the history of computing. It is still not a good idea even now.

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological orde

[Anonymous Coward]

GP here. Yes. Microsoft's browser monopoly shenanigans are technically not something that affected anyone other than Microsoft users that didn't have the ability to work around it. However, incompetant web developers that only developed for IE should have been mentioned separately. Thanks for bringing that up.

Fuck Yahoo

[Snotnose]

Oddly enough the article is on Yahoo, which breaks the rule. I can tell Yahoo why their eyeballs keep dropping. It's because crap like this makes your pages hard to read.

Re:Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know who David Pogue is, you have no business criticizing anything related to usability. Just keep on making your crappy interfaces and collect your check.

Re:Let's get them good

[tripleevenfall]

Does he not know that space makes the screen scroll DOWN, not up?

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological orde

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for all the 'made for Internet Explorer' pages which abused ActiveX to the detriment of Netscape.

Also, arrow keys that don't move the page

[TeknoHog]

The article mentions scrolling up/down small abounts with the keyboard, presumably by using arrow keys. They are also handy for browsing pages wider than the browser window. Alas, many sites break the sideways logic -- when pressing left or right, they send you to the prev/next section of the site. For example, next topic on a discussion forum.

I wonder who actually uses such a "feature" -- surely the kids today don't even use a keyboard, that relic from the 1960s terminal world.

Re:Also, arrow keys that don't move the page

[Misagon]

I usually have a 1920 wide screen divided equally into two browser windows. That allows me to organize my tabs into multiple windows by task or web site instead of having them all run into each other.

With that layout, most web sites do fit inside each window. However, there has unfortunately been a convention to design web sites for 1024 pixels width... which is slightly above 1920/2. That means that on some sites, I would have to scroll just a little bit left or right to make certain elements visible.

Re:Also, arrow keys that don't move the page

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll add another complaint to this: Youtube hijacks the home key to control the player, even when the player isn't visible onscreen.

So, if you watch a video and then decide to scroll down to look at the related video list on the side (or the comments, if you're a masochist), you can't hit the home key to get back to the top of the page. Nope, that just kicks the video back to 0:00 and starts playing it again.

Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

Anything that breaks scrolling

[Yvan256]

There's been a trend since the last few years making websites scroll via javascript, which completely takes over the user settings. I always turn off the annoying "smooth scrolling" feature, but since those damn scripts take over the browser built-in scrolling, I'm forced to see their so-called "smooth scrolling" which is slower than the built-in one and is overtaxing my old CPU/GPU. The end result is a forced choppy scrolling that looks like crap and make me hate your brand/company.

The second annoying trend, also related to scrolling, is hiding multiple backgrounds and having sections of the website "reveal" those backgrounds as you scroll the page. That's even more taxing on my old CPU/GPU and makes scrolling, even the built-in one, choppy.

The worst possible situation is idiot "designers" using both of these stupid ideas at the same time. The result is that it's so annoying that I simply disable CSS and Javascript just to be able to read the damn content, which is the job of a website in the first place, i.e. give me information.

Re:Anything that breaks scrolling

[cas2000]

agree on every point.

btw, i found your comment by searching for "smooth" to see if anyone else had mentioned the annoyance of crappy javascript implementing its own smooth-scrolling. I turn that off in every browser because it shits me, I don't want it turned on again - but slower and more cpu intensive and even more annoying - because of some shitty javascript library for wanky designers

Fortunately, this crap is only common on sites that don't display anything at all without javascript enabled (an almost sure sign of a page I don't want to read, so can be closed immediately without regret)

Web developer here

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard about this feature before, never used it, seems like a waste of time to code it. Not sure what this article is about really....

What people should be pissed about is the continuing use a mysql/php/apache in the face of mongodb/javascript/nodejs. Old boys clubs playing circle jerk with each other over proprietary this that and the other when the truth is, everything should be easy to use and free. While I know LAMP is free, it's just so shit that you cannot enable proper functionality of core operations without plugins and garbage code being injected willy nilly left right and center. As far as easy goes, there is really nothing I have ever seen easier than fusing all components into one logic language that is extremely mnemonic to learn and use. It reduces development time, maintenance time, and opens up possibilities which did not exist before.

Page scroll by space bar is like nittering about how a cancer patient farts too much, your sort of missing the larger issues to focus on something stupid.

Re:Web developer here

[Anonymous Coward]

Web developer here. Never heard about this feature before, never used it, seems like a waste of time to code it. Not sure what this article is about really....

If usability and standards are too hard for you, then maybe you should stop playing at being a 'web developer' and retrain in something you can handle, like being a line-order cook.

Re:Web developer here

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard about this feature before, never used it, seems like a waste of time to code it. Not sure what this article is about really....

You, as a web developer, do not have to code it. The browsers have coded it for you already!

What you need to do is not fucking break it.

Re:Web developer here

[ZenShadow]

What people should be pissed about is the continuing use a mysql/php/apache in the face of mongodb/javascript/nodejs.

The only tool you own is a hammer, isn't it...

Re:Web developer here

[Anonymous Coward]

I sort of think of it like kitchen utensiles. I can either buy a useless stupid garlic press that I barely ever use and it's a pain in the ass to clean. Or I just finely chop the garlic with a regular knife that everyone has and cleans a whole lot faster/easier.

Re:Web developer here

[ZenShadow]

Y'know, that analogy just kinda falls apart all over the place if you're trying to promote node/mongo with it.

LAMP has been around a lot longer than nodejs and mongo. Everyone has it, and there's a reason why a lot of people still use it (hint: it isn't because they don't want to learn something new). And the tools around node for build and deployment are an egregiously overcomplicated mess. Mongo has its own pain points. And yes, I happen to use both, along with various LAMP-based applications. And some Ruby. And a number of other things.

LAMP is the knife you're talking about. It's everywhere, easy to work with, and extremely well supported. Node and friends are the garlic press -- we're just in the popular phase where everyone is buying one and telling their friends that they aren't cool if they don't have one too.

All tools have their place. If you can't understand that, then you're either (a) lazy, (b) in the wrong business, (c) a flaming idiot, or (d) all of the above.

Re:Let's get them good

[DaphneDiane]

It makes the view move down causing the contents or page to scroll up. In no cases should it cause the screen to move unless your device is on unstable surface.

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological orde

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I completely overlooked that. You are correct.

Random jackass whines about nonsense

[rebelwarlock]

Who gives a shit? That's not actually what the spacebar is supposed to do in the first place. Besides, we already have the page down key.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

This ^^
Appears to be a "self-appointed" rule for spacebar usage. Never heard of this guy, never heard of this rule.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[bidule]

Besides, we already have the page down key.

No we don't.

They both have the same broken behavior. You missed the forest for the trees.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Argilo]

It's not just about the spacebar. On those sites, the page down key doesn't work correctly either.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[uvajed_ekil]

Who gives a shit? That's not actually what the spacebar is supposed to do in the first place. Besides, we already have the page down key.

I'm much more concerned about organizations I trusted for news (like Slashdot) report on stories like this as if they are important or matter. No, the space bar doesn't always function as it used to on web pages, and the author's 1954 Studebaker Conestoga doesn't like today's unleaded ethanol gasoline blends, either, but neither of those are major problems.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever wrote the headline did that for us, genius. The headline doesn't say anything about Page Down being broken, which would be a lot less clickbaity and make a lot more sense.

In any case, both techniques suck ass because they don't keep enough of the previous content visible to force the perception of continuity.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to be able to just bash the spacebar when I am reading text. Sure, page down works, but the space bar is easier when I just want to continue reading.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

If PageDown works, then why aren't browsers implementing "spacebar" by calling the code for PageDown?

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

On Slashdot we assume a minimal level of intelligence. Since Page Down and Space-Bar scrolling do the same function, it would be pretty ridiculous if they were each implemented with separate code in the browser. Therefore they share the same code and are either both working or both broken.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

On Slashdot we assume a minimal level of intelligence.

I would say "you must be new here," but you're evidently speaking as a seasoned veteran.

Actually on Slashdot we assume a minimum level of shared ignorance, and hope that when we pedantically chastise someone on a bit of trivia, that no one more knowledgeable will step in and smack us down!

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[radarskiy]

I'm old enough to remember when "buttery smooth" scrolling seemed to be of vital importance on Slashdot.

Re:Random jackass whines about nonsense

[bidule]

Since Page Down and Space-Bar scrolling do the same function, it would be pretty ridiculous if they were each implemented with separate code in the browser.

Yeah, I assumed one didn't need to be a genius to get that.

Re:It’s like they want you to use ad blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

> Get rid of css, problem solved.

Yeah, that'll happen.

I'm Not Going To Lie

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to lie. Every one of those sites has sucked massive donkey dick for a long time, and it's got nothing to do with space bar scrolling.

Re:Let's get them good

[coastwalker]

I am sorry but when did you not get the memo that the mobile web site makes the money and that keyboard users can go fuck themselves. ha ha ha!

Re:Let's get them good

[rossdee]

I must admit I didn't know what a pogue was, so I googled, and got a definition equating to REMF
(Rear Echelon Moother-F***er)

so who originated this venerable function, anyway?

[swschrad]

I remember this action on a CDC Cyber editor, and on a DEC VMS editor back in the early 80s. but where did this useful function really come from ?

More sites that mess with scrolling

[Anonymous Coward]

I always turn off smooth scrolling in Firefox or Chrome because I don't care for it. The New York Times web site designers apparently think I'm wrong and nytimes.com uses smooth scrolling when I press the spacebar or the Page-Up and Page-Down keys.

When I am done checking my Outlook.com email and logout I'm sent to Msn.com. That page puts the cursor and focus in a search box, so when I press spacebar it doesn't scroll - it thinks I'm entering text.

All in all these are just minor annoyances, I guess.

clicking the scroll bar

[boguslinks]

I've noticed this issue for a couple years now, but I scroll down by clicking the scroll bar above the "down" arrow. Am I the only person who scrolls that way?

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological orde

[QuietLagoon]

...Microsoft's browser monopoly shenanigans are technically not something that affected anyone other than Microsoft users that didn't have the ability to work around it....

Au contraire... It appeared that Microsoft's goal was to leverage its Windows monopoly in an attempt to push the web "standards" towards its Internet Explorer capabilities. Microsoft wanted the web to work best when viewed via Internet Explorer, and in the process, take control of the web in the same manner in which they took control of the desktop.

.
Microsoft wanted the web client to drive the web standards development, instead of the standards driving the web client development. Fortunately, Microsoft failed. However, inside many companies, the web doesn't work right unless it works right with IE.

And while we're at it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

And while we're at it, can we name and shame the fucktards who implement the "infinitely scrolling" page feature?

I hate that shit- you can't bookmark the page properly, and if you back up to it then it either loses it's memory of where you were (forcing you to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll down to where you were) OR it forces you to reload 150 pages of crap back to get back to where you were. Either way its a pain in the ass and a hostile UI design.

Re:And while we're at it

[Anonymous Coward]

It also causes the browser to use ever increasing amounts of memory as you scroll down and more data loads.

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological orde

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did you deliberately leave off Internets Explorer 6 thru 11?" - He doesn't use the internet.

and another thing...

[mad7777]

Amen to all that, and also, can we have a report of websites that, despite the millions undoubtedly spent on breathtaking design, can't be bothered simply to place the focus in the search field when the page is loaded? It's 2016, people... Is this still hard??? I'm looking at you IMDB (which used to do it right, but has chosen to suck in so many ways in recent years), Amazon... and so many others.

Re: and another thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow you're dense.

If the focus was auto set to the search field, then scrolling by space bar wouldn't work since it enter spaces in the search field instead.

Oh noes

[uvajed_ekil]

Hitting "return" also doesn't bring you back to the left side of your sheet of paper and to the next line with the "ding" of a bell anymore, either, and rotary-dial phones are becoming increasingly rare. Just do like everyone else and press the buttons on your new-fangled wireless mobile phone gizmo and hit the damn "page down" key or scroll on your mouse or touchpad when you want to move down a web page. The web isn't all plain html these days, if you hadn't noticed, and a lot of page views are on devices that don't even have a physical space bar.

Re:Oh noes

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the page down key is equally broken, and possibly less convenient depending on your keyboard. This is a usability issue.

Never a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, sorry. I thought this was about a pub in Mos Eisley.

That's what Emacs does

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what Emacs does: space page down, backwards space, page up.

And chrome has stopped using backward delete to go to the previous page for a while now.

Re:Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

So he's some guy who's dick you suck?

Many of the websites work just fine.

[thegarbz]

I'm wondering if the guy who wrote the article has a dodgy plugin or browser that doesn't work correctly. I took a random selection of his websites and not a single word was obscured on any of the following:
- The Wall Street Journal
- The New Yorker
- Tumblr
- FiveThirtyEight
- Kickstarter

I'll leave it to someone else to check the rest but frankly this article has been the biggest waste of my time today ... and I spent 4 hours in a car today.

That's the browser's problem

[locketine]

Since this is a browser feature and many sites have floating top bars, I think the browser is responsible, not the website. The browser feature that enables the float could easily accommodate the scroll feature properly. This would be preferable to asking every site to implement custom JavaScript for a minority of users.

Equally important: cursors

[nightfire-unique]

Web pages should never, ever be able to remap view control keys such as cursors, page up/down, space, end or home, without a very prominent warning and permission prompt.

I'm looking at you, Google.

Cursors: they scroll the page. They always have. Stop commandeering them for bizarre behaviors.

Re:Equally important: cursors

[tepples]

If not the arrow keys, then what key would you recommend to move the player's character in a video game that the player is trying on the web before deciding to buy and install it locally?

Re:Equally important: cursors

[angel'o'sphere]

What is wrong with 'WASD'? or if you want them on the right hand: 'IJKL'.

Re:Equally important: cursors

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are making a web-based video game, don't make it so that I have to scroll to view the entire page.

If I never need to scroll, I don't run into the problem.

Re:Equally important: cursors

[tepples]

What is wrong with 'WASD'?

The fact that it differs among QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ layouts, and the fact that a user unfamiliar with a particular game is more likely to correctly guess arrow keys than to correctly guess WASD or IJKL.

Re:Equally important: cursors

[angel'o'sphere]

Good game designs automatically offer all three and an easy option to change it.

Arrow keys mean: the right hand is blocked which you usually better have available for other "actions" ... if the game has them.

But I anyway was only nitpicking ...

Re: Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

And?

Re:Let's get them good

[Desler]

A guy who thinks those annoying floating bars are okay? And he's some guy you claim to be a usability expert? Hahaha

Re: Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing. Congrats on finally getting a regular glory hole customer.

Everything is a mess of broken javascript

[RightwingNutjob]

But hey...when your options to hire a web designer are

1. Some dude from India who works for pennies to copy and paste broken javascript in between walking 15 miles to the nearest well
2. Some dude bro from a domestic coding academy who works for dollars to copy and paste broken javascript in between 15-minute bouts of tweeting about the injustice of it all

whaddayagonnado?

Re:Everything is a mess of broken javascript

[Areyoukiddingme]

whaddayagonnado?

Not hire either one of them and compose my own motherfucking website.

Re:Everything is a mess of broken javascript

[tepples]

And then someone adds six lines of CSS to make it more readable, resulting in a better MFing website. (The one thing I disagree with on Better is "A little less contrast".)

Re: The scourges of the WWW, in chronological ord

[Anonymous Coward]

If Netscape plugin developers had built a better mousetrap....

disable positionig

[jjohn_h]

The issue is all those click objects dispersed on the page. Get rid of them with a browser that has a toggle to switch positioning on/off. e.g. Opera 12.17.

You might be able to write a little js routine for your browser doing the same.

Re: so who originated this venerable function, any

[Anonymous Coward]

the more command in unix?

Use Reader View and get rid of the crap

[xtsigs]

Of all the things wrong with web site design, the spacebar scrolling function is what bothers you? Here's what you do:
1) Install and use Firefox.
2) Tap "Enter Reader View" at the end of the URL box.
3) Use the spacebar to scroll pages if that is what turns you on.

In any case, you'll get rid of all the floating crap that gets in the way of actually reading the article. That stuff is just as bad as the blinking text (I mean the text literally blinked--not kidding) from the 90s.

If Reader View doesn't work on the particular website you care about, then just close it out and go to another. Except for a few cases where organizations do actual journalism, everyone just says pretty much just copies each other.

I hate SPACE scroll

[Visarga]

I'd rather use space as a dedicated play/pause button. It's stupid to go to YouTube and hit space to play a video, and it scrolls the page. But if you focus the payer, then space changes functionality and becomes the video start/stop controller. It's confusing. Who scrolls with space when you have page down, arrow and scroll wheel? Why not have a large juicy video player button instead?

<a href="#anchor">

[iTrawl]

Spacebar schmaizebar... Clicking on <a href="#anchor> to go to a <a name="anchor"> will hide the target row under the stupid toolbar too. Some sites use JS to scroll back the size of the toolbar to compensate, and it looks creepty as fuck when they do that.

Cmon this is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the Internet scroll great again.

Enter versus Return

[Anonymous Coward]

Early PCs did not have both an Enter and a Return key. They had one or the other. It was this way in the late 70s at least with the Apple II, IBM PC, Commodore computers, and more.

What exactly are you calling a PC that had both? If such a thing existed, it predates the makes I listed -and- the term PC. Some truly ancient microcomputer, perhaps?

Re:Enter versus Return

[lgw]

Early PCs did not have both an Enter and a Return key

When did I say "early PCs"? PCs have only been around since the late 70s. Computing and human interfaces were around for decades before personal computers. Do you know what a terminal is?

You know that home computers only became popular (beyond a tiny geek hobby) about halfway through the history of general-purpose computers, right? And that getting and posting forms was the norm for user interaction from almost the beginning?

Speaking of chronological order

[presidenteloco]

But "navigation bars or toolbars at the top of the web page" do not fall into the category of WWW scourges.

That's been a standard web page design since about, I don't know, 1993.

And making the toolbar stay there while the rest of the content scrolls has been there since the invention of frames (1994?) and CSS (1996).

So whoever invented the clever space bar thing (probably sometime after those dates), should have taken all of those common page designs into account when implementing the scroll control feature.

Re:Speaking of chronological order

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that clever space bar thing was surely invented long after CSS. <eyeroll>

Re:Speaking of chronological order

[presidenteloco]

ok but when was space-scrolling first implemented in browsers, which is what I was talking about.

Also, maybe it's just me, but I would be hesitant to use the spacebar for some secondary purpose like this because I would always be afraid of inserting an extra space into some editable document / form field that just happens to have focus somewhere on my crowded screen. In other words, I think maintaining space-to-scroll feature in a multi-window context is pretty bad user interaction design.

Re:in other words

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

...Person in his second half-century complains that UI element he's comfortable with is no longer as universal as he thinks it should be

What, you're ragging on him because he's older and has more experience than you? Way to go, young lady, you're like so awesome!.

-

In military slang, 'pogue' is a derogatory term for some REMF that has no clue how the world works in reality. That's about right.

In everyday slang, 'argStyopa' is a derogatory term for a pantywaist that thinks she knows it all, while still carrying a Fischer-Price lunchbox

Re:Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

David Pogue is exactly as GP said, a random nobody. He's never even done any UI/UX design, which I have.

Space should never scroll the screen and anyone who thinks it's a good idea is a moron. We have already had PgUp and PgDn for that exact thing for decades.

Fn+Down

[tepples]

hit the damn "page down" key

Having to use two hands to hold Fn and press Down Arrow to activate the PgDn scancode is less convenient than just pressing the big fat spacebar with one hand.

a lot of page views are on devices that don't even have a physical space bar.

And a lot are on devices that do, such as the laptop into which I'm typing this comment. So unless you're requiring the user to receive SMS for account confirmation, or your web application's core functionality depends on continuous geolocation, a substantial fraction of users are going to end up on desktops, laptops, or tablets with a clip-on keyboard.

Re:Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck have you ever published?

That's not the worst thing broken

[fox171171]

In the beginning, as a web page loaded, stuff jumped around and moved about as more and more arrived over our painfully slow connections. Made it pretty hard to read anything until it was done.

Then things sped up, and using "WIDTH" and "HEIGHT" attributes in image tags, and probably all sort of other innovations, it stopped happening. You could read a page and it didn't jump all over the place while it finished loading. Yay!

Well, somehow we've traveled back to the 90's, because that shit is happening all over again. Very annoying trying to read text that keeps moving. Somebody broke something.

Slashdot on phone

[fox171171]

For some reason on my phone, when I click on "older", when it goes to the next page, you see the top but jump along until it gets to the bottom, and it is pointless to try to read anything until it finishes, as it will keep going regardless of attempts to read something at the top. When it is done, then I need to scroll to the top to read the newest "older" posts. PITA.

Re:Let's get them good

[Anonymous Coward]

I met David Pogue once. He is the biggest asshole I've met in my entire. Not exaggerating even a little bit.
Seriously, fuck that guy.

Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally someone is addressing the REAL problems with the internet!

where is the standard?

[Anonymous Coward]

been coding web sites for 20+ years and have never used space to scroll. Never had a QA department test it.

So unless you can show me the W3C standard I am supposed to be following this is just a cheap browser trick some browsers have implemented.

Re:Let's get them good

[Hognoxious]

I know Donald Norman. David Pogue is no Donald Norman .

Re:in other words

[argStyopa]

I'm a 50 year old man, btw. "Styopa" is Russian, short for (variously) Stepan. And the arg (in case you're doubting my age) was actually my quake (1) clan [arg!] which I was into when I started reading Slashdot...then they later changed their login format, so I lost the [ and ] and !.

I just find old people that bitch because something changes tiresome.

Re:so who originated this venerable function, anyw

[doconnor]

The unix utility more was written in 1978, according to Wikipedia.

Space scrolling? Tab sets !

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a more insidious problem being tab sets in forms and applications. FirstName (tab) --> address [not LastName] WTF

Re:in other words

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I'm a 50 year old man,

Then start acting like one instead of some whiny little millennial bitch who's complaining that the rice in the cafeteria sushi isn't authentic enough to satisfy her standards.

-

And the arg (in case you're doubting my age) was actually my quake (1) clan [arg!]

That's nice, dear.

-

I just find old people that bitch because something changes tiresome.

Then say hello to the mirror for me.

And it's not just that "something changed", it's that a useful existing standard is being broken for no good reason.

Re:in other words

[argStyopa]

"And it's not just that "something changed", it's that a useful existing standard is being broken for no good reason."
So, yes, it IS in fact "something changed" and you're Mr Pogue's cute little white-knight. Adorable.

Maybe the fact that something existed for a while doesn't mean it is intrinsically worth preserving?

Hint: try the pgdwn key?
Or your mouse wheel?
Or clicking on the slidebar?
Or sliding the screen indicator on the slidebar?
Considering other web-systems have adopted the spacebar for their functions (ie stop/start video, etc) maybe it was a good time to abandon a method that wasn't all that widely used anyway?

I find the hardest thing to explain to old people is that there usually a multitude of ways to do the same thing on a computer, and not to get too upset or fixated on a single method.

I guess that's still true.

Re:in other words

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I find the hardest thing to explain to old people is that there usually a multitude of ways to do the same thing on a computer, and not to get too upset or fixated on a single method.

Lol, I'll remember that the next time you spout off about something changing that you don't like. It'll happen. :)

Worse: key hijacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrow keys for browsing an image gallery or slideshow can be OK. But sites that switch to a completely different article when I want to do a horizontal scroll with LEFT or RIGHT -- what are they thinking?

And don't get me started about tab order.

There are two cures

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Readability
2. If that fails, View -> Page Style -> No Style. Fixes the grey on grey madness too.

Re:Let's get them good

[MercTech]

Or do you mean the 40% of users that are so clueless about HTML standards that they don't even know you can change the font size of a web page with a keystroke? Ctrl- +/- for the clueless.