Re: Scrollbar bug on OS X

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 7 Apr 2005, at 20:30, David Kastrup wrote:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>>>     PS: The only problem is that those toolkits have the idiotic
>>>     idea to enforce that the bottom of the thumb cannot go further
>>>     than the bottom.  And they enforce it by hiding the events
>>>     corresponding to "user moves the mouse yet-further-down".
>>
>>> I can talk with the GTK developers about this.  And also with the
>>> LessTif developers.  Should I do that?
>>
>> Feel free to try, but I don't have much hope:
>> - The LessTif people are probably bound by compatibility.
>> - The Gtk people are usually bound by dogmatism.
>
> Didn't Miles in the context of "David would welcome Athena semantics
> even with fancy-looking scrollbars" mention that it would be possible
> to process the scrollbar events without even passing them into the
> scrollbar widgets in the first place?

I understand something like that is happening in the mac port, which 
makes it very hard to get decent behavior in the first place.

Users exert their freedom to chose a particular UI environment. GTK can 
be seen as part of an environment, as it creates compatible behavior 
across applications. As mentioned earlier in this thread, UI is more 
than the pretty visual image of a widget - it's the behavior that 
counts.

Consistency is extremely important. While I respectfully disagree with 
Stefan's view that it is an "idiotic idea" to not let the 'thumb' 
extend beyond the bottom of the scrollbar, and while I think that this 
commonly used scrollbar behavior is actually consistent with the 
document/window metaphor put forward in most modern windowing 
environments since the mid-80's (which implies no over-scrolling), I 
think that a discussion about what the right behavior is is not 
necessary at all. Instead, suffice it to say that it should be up to 
the UI layer to implement the exact behavior.

That would respect the user's choice of environment (provided GTK 
implements things correctly.)