- From: E. Stephen Mack <estephen@emf.net>
- Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 17:19:35 -0700
- To: www-html@w3.org
The so-called "portrait vs. landscape" scrolling issue is not just about visual presentation. It invokes larger issues of the context of information on a page. However, the discussion currently applies only to visual user agents. (But it may be applied to auditory browsers whenever there is information that is presented in parallel: for example, two people speaking at once, or music playing in a background). Walter Ian Kaye <walter@natural-innovations.com> wrote: >In a mode where >the document were to wrap vertically and scroll horizontally, how would >one read lines of text? It just doesn't work that way (as far as humans >reading is concerned), thus the text wraps horizontally and scrolls >vertically. This is also the way all Word Processors behave -- the words >are wrapped horizontally and the document scrolls vertically. This was >not a paradigm invented just for HTML -- it's simply the way *we* read. It doesn't have to be so. Text doesn't have to wrap at all -- it can just extend horizontally. That allows different ideas to be presented within the vertical space. For example, Wired magazine presents a feature in the front of their magazine where a few lines in the middle scroll "horizontally" from page to page. (Annnoyingly so, I must admit.) Computer screens, as Peter Flynn pointed out, are typically "landscape" in that they are wider than they are tall, while pieces of paper are typically "portrait" by default. Consider a screen with some information (apologies for ASCII art): _______________ / \ | Information 1 | | | | Information 2 | \_______________/ Normally we think of the screen as a porthole of a longer vertical page, with a vertical scroll bar to move us "up" and "down" on the page: _______________________ | | | Information 1 | | _________________ | | / |^\ | | | Information 2 |X| | | | |X| | | | Information 3 |V| | | \_______________|_/ | | | |_____________________| But there's no reason WHY information can't be presented in parallel, horizontally scrolled: ___________________________________________________ | _______________ | | / \ | | Information 1 | Information 2 | Information 3 | | | | | | Information 4 | Information 5 | Information 6 | | |_______________| | | |<XXXXXXXXXXXXX>| | | \_______________/ | |_________________________________________________| Regardless of personal opinions regarding the effectivness or desirability of this way of presenting information, there are times when it may be necessary or desirable. (Currently, this could be accomplished using tables or a PRE element with a lot of spaces. Neither recourse is particularly desirable.) HTML already has plenty of implicit assumptions regarding the the presentation of information. Many of these assumptions are in the areas of elements that depend on visual presentation, such as the deprecated formatting elements. But while we are thinking about what HTML elements are visual and explicitly oriented, we should consider the nature of a "paragraph" of information. The implicit assumption of that paragraph is that it is related to the previous paragraphs in a vertical orientation. I believe that it's vital to expose the assumptions regarding the presentation of paragraphs, and see what options are available to HTML authors for changing implicit models. I also think it's important to expose all of HTML's assumptions and question whether or not other models are possible, desirable, and viable. (Probably it's more important to concentrate on the concrete elements of the draft HTML 4.0 so that the W3C can confidently move it forward towards being a recommendation, though. But I've always been interested in horizontally-scrolling pages so I find this discussion area to be of interest.) -- E. Stephen Mack <estephen@emf.net> http://www.emf.net/~estephen/
Received on Friday, 15 August 1997 20:19:06 UTC