Re: [css4-ui] Scrollbar tracking control

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 11:52 AM, Simon Fraser <smfr@me.com> wrote:
> I’m finding it hard to understand, from Mike’s original email, what the intent is here.
> Is it to preserve the user’s scroll position as content is being added dynamically to the document?
>
> This is certainly a request we’ve heard from people like Facebook, but I’m not sure it’s solvable in CSS.

No, not full tracking.  (Though I came up with suggestions for that in
the past.)

It's just about "sticking" the scrollbar to a particular edge when
it's close enough to that edge, even as content is added.  That is, if
the scroll position is within X distance of the indicated sticky edge,
any adjustments to the scroll width/height of the element maintain
your relative distance to the edge.

It's mainly for the common case of chat windows and other log-type
things (consoles, etc.) that add content at the bottom.  It's
*remarkably* difficult to make a robust chat window that properly
sticks the scrollbar to the bottom of the window - I get regular
complaints from the people implementing Gmail chat windows about this.

~TJ