RE: Request for Comments: Proposal for Touch-Based Animation Scrubbing

[François REMY:]
>I was just reacting to the comments saying that Tab's proposal would 
> make the scrolling experience worse, which is not true. In the worst 
> case, the scrolling experience stays the same.

That is your opinion. Others may see it differently, based on their 
experience. I also see the pushback as being somewhat more nuanced 
than this; mainly, you can't just make a prediction based on all things
being equal. When we are successful making something easy for developers, 
they'll tend to do more of it - that's the idea! - thus making it easier 
also raises their expectations. Implementors - we, at any rate - don't 
just count on 'moving code to the platform' to make things faster (even 
though it generally does). We also assume that by building the feature 
in we are lowering its 'price' to developers, thus increasing future 
demands i.e. tomorrow's use-cases will be potentially far more taxing 
than the ones that motivated the original work. (And that is the idea too!) 
And so we like having the headroom to scale somewhat beyond yesterday's 
JS-based use-cases. 

So the question is not just whether yesterday's 'prior art' will perform 
better but: when developers of all skill level have access to this capability 
with a few lines of CSS, how much more will they be able to achieve before 
things look janky again? Janky being defined in the eye of end-users who, 
as Dean points out, are extremely sensitive to scroll perf on touch devices; 
which in turn constrains us implementors far more than you'd suspect. Thus 
the potential for improvement, while real, may in fact be far too marginal 
to be worth pursuing for some of us. Scrolling, as it turns out, is hard.

Others such as Google may believe otherwise and have different priorities; 
and that's totally fine. They should pursue them. 

And as this is also far too many words on a topic I don't want to spend
much time on, I'll stop right here...

Received on Sunday, 2 December 2012 18:12:55 UTC