scroll-position

The standard flow of text is top to bottom. Yet it has become conventional to list ordered data (such as a mailbox) bottom to top, possibly 
due to the fact that the initial scroll position is normally at the top, and of course it's preferable to have the newest data visible at 
start.

I call for a way to put the scroll-position at bottom initially using css, so that data can be listed top to bottom, but still start with 
focus on the newest item.
It may be easy to do with javascript and the scrollTop property, but obviously that would require javascript, and as the scrolling cannot 
be done before the page has been drawn, the scrolling would become noticeable which is not good.
I suggest a css syntax like this:

#foo {
  height: 100px;
  overflow: auto;
  scroll-position-y: end 0; /* ALIGNMENT: start | end ; OFFSET: absolute value, or possibly some percentage */
}

Of course, there would also be scroll-position-x.
If wanting to extend this further, there could also be like:

{
  scroll-position: show('<element ID>' start 10px);
}

which would take care of scrolling so that the top of <element> lies 10 pixels below the upper edge of the viewport.

When using DOM, this could become the preferable way to scroll viewports dynamically, rather than using the non-standard scrollTop.

Another problem arises as more content is added to the scrolled element: you may want to keep the scrolling at bottom, like how a chat 
window works. Either that could be done by reissuing the style property with scripting, or there could be some sort of "fixed" attribute to 
the scroll-position.

Markus

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2007 09:57:38 UTC