Re: Scrollbar bug on OS X

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Consistency is extremely important.

I think Ralph Waldo Emerson would disagree.

There's consistency and there's consistency.  In my experience, what people
care about is "in which direction and by how much does my thingy move when
I click with button X on part Y of the scrollbar" and "does the slider's
position and size reflect the part and quantity of my thingy that is
currently displayed".  The size of the slider while dragging is often
something they barely notice since while dragging they're not looking at the
scrollbar but at the thingy instead.  [ replace "thingy" with "buffer",
"spreadsheet", "html page", ...]

The precise size of a slider seems to only annoy GUI-fanatics (aka people
who know what is "the document/window metaphor"), and the only justification
I've ever heard for their complaint is "that's not how God meant it to
work", which reinforces me in my belief that it's just dogmatism rather than
an actual concern for the unenlightened user.

As for overscrolling: yes, it has puzzled a few users occasionally, because
it's not obvious where the buffer actually ends.  But note that this problem
is not specific to overscrolling since it already appears when viewing
a buffer too small to fill the window.

> 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,

The only reason why you disagree is because you haven't tried to write the
code that interfaces something like Emacs with one of those silly
scrollbars.  After working on such code you realize that GUI guidelines
might be great, but they shouldn't be "cast in code" directly in the GUI
library because there are always exceptions.


        Stefan