Re: [css-overflow]: Suggestion - add property value to allow scrolling without scrollbar

> On 28 Feb 2015, at 00:04, Axel Dahmen <brille1@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "Florian Rivoal"  schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:521A25AB-C03B-44F8-9353-25A441C03683@rivoal.net...
>> Also, while this should be fairly easy to spec and to implement, I am not fully convinced this is actually a good idea to give this control to authors. As a platform wide setting, or a user controlled preference, sure, but I worry that having many sites being inconsistent with each-other about the look and feel of scrolling would be detrimental to users ability to recognise scrollable things.
> 
> Certainly, hiding the system scrollbar wouldn't be the end of the story for the author, of course. It's just a necessary prerequisite.
> 
> After having hidden the system scrollbar, authors would be able to add/apply their own, custom, visual cues for scrolling. Imagine a scrolling jog wheel. Or a paging scroll header ("page 1 of 10"). Or something similar to a progress bar. Anything but the system provided scroll bars. Even nothing, if that's the intention of the author. We should leave the decision of which or whether a visual cue is to be provided to the author.


Hiding for the purpose of providing a custom made alternative that looks different because it is applied to a different context, as your examples suggest, sounds perfectly valid to me.

But with the same control, you let authors who have a personal preference for invisible scrollbars inflict the confusion on unsuspecting users who just want common controls to look as they always do.

Of course, you can't prevent people from making lousy pages if they want to, but we should think twice before providing people with footguns. Maybe this is actually ok, but I'd like to try and consider other ways to get us the benefits while reducing the risks before we jump on this.

 - Florian

Received on Friday, 27 February 2015 16:15:53 UTC