Re: Taking a look at overflow: pan

On 7/29/2010 1:31 PM, Simon Fraser wrote:
> On Jul 29, 2010, at 1:24 PM, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>
>> I've been working on a project which implements tiled scrolling...
>> Today from Ajaxian I saw the YUI 3 update, included in it is an 
>> implementation
>> of ScrollView.
>>
>> ScrollView is in some sense: overflow: pan;
>>
>> It's similar to overflow: scroll, but instead of showing scroll bars, 
>> it allows
>> the user to pan across the element, showing scroll indicators.
>>
>> This causes some implementation difficulties when it comes to text 
>> selection.
>>
>> Android, iOS (Apple) and YUI are supporting this style of 
>> overflow/scrolling.
>
> iOS does not support panning inside of overflow regions inside the 
> page, only at the page level.
> This is therefore a detail of the UA's scrolling implementation.
>
> It's not clear to me that this is anything other than a UA design 
> decision, based on the
> characteristics of the user-interaction of the device the page is 
> being presented on.

There are a few implementations of the technique popping up on the web.
You're correct, that iOS does not have much in the way of scrolling 
within areas.

I put out iOS merely as example of the technique. "overflow: pan scroll" 
would enable
authors to 'hide' the scroll bars while still allowing the user to scroll.

While it's currently used as a UA design decision; it appears that there 
is a growing
market on the web, for authors to make that decision on their own.

As there are an increasing amount of libraries implementing this design 
decision,
it's a good time to consider having a standard syntax for specifying the 
choice.

My thinking is that, re-using overflow, while still specifying "scroll" 
would allow
backward compatibility while still suggesting to the UA, that scroll 
bars be 'hidden';

I'm certainly open for other ideas -- authors will be implementing the 
function regardless,
using overflow: hidden, and scrollTo techniques.

-Charles