Here's my contribution, although I'm not very familiar with Shoes and scrollbars. See if it makes sense, if not, ignore.
If the scrollbar problem only applied to the scrollbar of an entire window, I'd say put the scrollbar on the outside of the window, at least in the pixel metric sense. I believe someone already mentioned a variation of that idea. However, that whould create a whole new family of problems when dealing with internal flows that are scrollable. The greyed-out scrollbar would simplify this issue considerably (at least you know what to expect, like in the case of borders), but it just looks wrong. Anyway, I had the following strange idea: add a scrollbar box to a containing box to make the latter scrollable. Where: flow do > title "A very long story" > ... etc ... > scrollbar left => -10 > end > creates a scrollbar of 10 px width on the right side of the box. If there is no scrollbar, then this area is just 10px of empty space. And here's a twist: flow do > title "Re: A very long story" > ... even more etc ... > scrollbar left => -10 do > ... whatever goes here only shows when the scrollbar is gone ... > end > end > The point is that this would remind you that the scrollbar is going to blot out an entire area when it appears, and you know exactly what that area is going to be. And re: Giles Bowkett, it will give you a mechanism of providing the position and dimensions of the scrollbar in an intuitive way. Of course, the width of other boxes inside the parent box should be adjusted, so they won't disappear underneath the scrollbar box. If not, this would just be a very complicated way of shifting the whole problem. Sebastiaan On 29/01/2008, Michael Daines <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Yes, totally. It's up to you to add a gutter. I really like this > > rule a lot, but I'm dying to argue about it. Is it very wrong? > > I'm dying to know why you particularly like it so much! > > If the app is supposed to be scrollable, why not have a greyed-out > scroll bar if there is too little height to scroll? That avoids > worries about adding your own gutter: how wide? the same on every OS? > > Of course, I have come to expect the automatically appearing and > disappearing scroll bar. Here's a question for Edward Tufte: is a > greyed-out scrollbar more or less "computer administrative junk"? > > > -- Michael Daines >
