Suppress scroll bars - an idea

Mike Batchelor (mikebat@clark.net)
Sat, 1 Jul 1995 23:05:02 -0400 (EDT)


I really like the experimental <style> tags. I realize that HTML is
device-independent, and so I applaud the effort to allow authors some
control over presentation, by implementing an optional tag where hints can
be placed, outside the context of the body. Now if only Mozilla would
start supporting this stuff. :)

I have a suggestion for another style attribute: no-scrollbars. I don't
know about any of you, but I find it tiresome to use a scrollbar on a long
page, or have to shift to using the keyboard PgUp/PgDn keys to navigate.
My idea for a <style> attribute would turn off the browser scroll-bars (if
it has any), and use paging buttons instead to format the presentation (if
appropriate for the browser). I'm thinking of a set of buttons somewhere
on the controls for the browser, or on the page itself, which would let
you go one page forward, backwards, to the top, or to the bottom.

I've sort of done this on some Web pages I am writing, by sizing each page
so that it fits into the window size of the popular Unix browsers, as they
show with the default resources. This gives the whole site a kiosk or
slide-show feel, and you can navigate through it with just mouse clicks.
Of course, a Windows user at 640x480 standard VGA is going to have to
scroll, or at least hit the PgDn key once to see all the pages (and reach
the link buttons I placed at the bottom of each page for navigation).

Any comments?

-- 
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