From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sun Feb 10 2002 - 11:10:02 MST
Jacques writes:
> You read a web page. When you have finished reading a screenful, you
> hit "PageDown", and then resume reading at the top of the screen.
>
> But now you come to the penultimate screen and you hit "PageDown".
> Unless the remainder of the page is exactly one screen long, the top
> of the screen now shows text you have already read, and you have to scan
> the text to find where you were were reading before to hit "PageDown".
That's a good point, Jacques. I have the same problem when I use the
"more" or "less" programs on my Unix system to read mail or text files.
They go down a page at a time until the last page, and you're right, I
often waste several seconds trying to figure out where I was just reading.
Sometimes there are only a few lines of new material and it takes quite
a while before I figure that out. You'd think that upon reading the
first lines of the new page that I would immediately recognize how far
back in the text this was, but that's not true.
I can understand the reluctance of the designers to display a bunch of
blank lines at the end of the document when they don't really exist.
Maybe some other UI cue should be used, like a transient vertical bar
along one side, or some text shading, to distinguish the material you
have seen before from new text.
Hal
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