|
| cpcallen wrote:
| A very cute bit of coding.
|
| But: I've always wondered who uses these "back to the top"
| buttons, and why?
|
| Until quite recently I hardly ever had reason to go back to the
| top of the page--I was much more likely to click a link or click
| the back button--and if I did a quick tap of the home key or
| flick of the touchscreen usually did the trick. Conveniently,
| both gestures work even if you've not gotten all the way down to
| the "back to the top" button.
|
| More recently with Chrome on iOS I find myself wanting to get to
| the top so I can use the pull-down-then-right gesture to close
| the tab. With really long pages sometimes a single flick isn't
| enough to get me all the way to the top--but then, on a really
| long page I'm also unlikely to have gotten all the way to the
| bottom.
| dheera wrote:
| I think it was more of a thing in a bygone era when scroll
| wheels and swiping didn't have that inertia effect to get you
| to the top efficiently.
|
| Nowadays you just swipe down fast once and the inertia gets you
| to the top but it used to once not be like that, and you had to
| thumb your screen 15 times to free solo your way to the top.
| electroly wrote:
| On iOS, tap the top of the screen to automatically scroll to
| the top.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| This also works in most apps, unless they're using some weird
| nonstandard UI (which is, perhaps surprisingly, less common
| on iOS than on macOS). And it works with Reachability.
| Neither of which are especially discoverable, but super handy
| if you know about them.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's usually some combination of the Home key that does
| the same on most desktop browsers, but the control key varies
| by OS and sometimes browser.
|
| What there isn't on iOS as far as I'm aware is a way to
| scroll to the bottom. On infinite scroll pages accidentally
| navigating away as one can easily do with touch screen
| results in a lot of frustration.
| majewsky wrote:
| Oh THAT'S what that's supposed to be. I was always wondering
| why my viewport jumps all over the place unprompted.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Except on AMP pages or on weird custom front ends. Long love
| plain html and css. Please don't override the platform
| default scroll acceleration either!
| mwexler wrote:
| And is frustratingly, conspicuously missing in Android. Every
| time I switch to my Android tablet, it's becomes a hugely
| missing piece for any content consumption app that scrolls.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I think I read here on HN that Apple holds a patent for
| that functionality.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| Yeah, I wish there were a way to scroll to the bottom too,
| i.e., double-tap the top of the screen/bar. It would come in
| handy quite frequently for me.
| [deleted]
| sandreas wrote:
| Yeah, in the days where fixed nav at top is often used by
| default it is not as common to have TOP links any more.
| Recently I searched for a way to PREVENT going to the top
| clicking a link that only
| had JavaScript in it and always jumped back and forth due to
| AJAX page reload.
|
| The solution[1] I found was using A no jump link.
|
| [1]https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/03/html-and-css-tricks/#no-
| jum...
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| On a pull-to-refresh style widget, the scrollbar needs to be at
| the top. This provides a shortcut to jump to the top and
| refresh.
| jerf wrote:
| I think back in Ye Olde Days it was harder for people who just
| had a scrollbar, and weren't necessarily all that familiar with
| that, either.
|
| There has never been a technical need for it. The "Home"
| keyboard button when pressed on a web page has taken you to the
| top probably since the very first web browser was released. But
| there's a lot of computer users for whom that entire complex of
| keys off to the right of Enter on a standard keyboard is The
| Outer Hinterlands, Where There Be Dragons, except for maybe the
| arrow keys. Also the entire line of function keys. Not everyone
| is an expert.
| unkulunkulu wrote:
| Reading your post I realized that I have not pressed a Home
| button for years. Now I have a strong Home button (and full
| sized keyboard in general) nostalgia and cannot sleep!
|
| I will just go ahead and press it next time I see a full
| sized keyboard I swear!
| davejitsu wrote:
| It's funny how sites used to play music all the time and now
| people are on the phone with the FBI to report any site with
| audio
| hinkley wrote:
| I was the accidental instigator of an incident where Mosaic for
| Windows ended up with April Fool's jokes embedded in it.
|
| It was probably the first time I noticed what others have
| noticed since then, which is that I have a way of asking
| questions that causes other people to react (often more than my
| attempts to directly influence).
|
| All I said was, "Isn't this going to be our last release before
| April 1?" Everyone got quiet for a minute, their eyes glinted,
| and we went from releasing at a reasonable hour for once to
| deploying at 1 am. Unfortunately the lead engineer (who ended
| up putting an audio clip of himself knocking on his CRT and
| saying, "hello? Is anybody out there?" on an idle timeout) and
| I had worked out all of the off-by-one errors on date
| calculations in Win32 early in the evening when we were still
| sharp, only for him to change the numbers in a crisis of faith
| later in the evening. So the whole thing fired on April 2.
| Which luckily was a Sunday, so few people using it at work or
| for classes were affected.
|
| It was all fun and games until the emails started coming in
| informing us that we may have been hacked. I like easter eggs
| in my games, but I've only ever mentioned this to coworkers as
| a cautionary tale about impulses and judgement when tired.
| Semiapies wrote:
| It's a funny thing. The Gemini people are so about a retro take
| on the web without any media you don't explicitly click on, but
| even twenty years ago, most of the history of the web involved
| media playing.
|
| (Mind, everyone got sick of unwarned, auto-playing media.)
| MisterTea wrote:
| We hated it back then too.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| You hated it back then
| hinkley wrote:
| There are dozens of us. DOZENS.
| jdrc wrote:
| websites are now meant to be "content" for google or social
| media. Social media are allowed all the permissions, websites
| no.
| hinkley wrote:
| We only like audio or video on a page when the point of the
| page is audio or video. Youtube. Conference slides. Podcasts.
|
| And even then I have a bad habit, in part due to multiple
| monitors, of trying to mix tabs and windows and sometimes I
| cannot for the life of me locate the tab that is playing when
| someone needs me for something. I may need a new rule about
| where such tabs need to live (separate window, one monitor,
| virtual desktop, something).
| jdrc wrote:
| then you have messaging apps that need to make
| notifications and they can't. The way google blocks audio
| at this point is not good.
| hinkley wrote:
| What would be nice is to be able to grant temporary
| notifications. Probably 20% of the time I'm not keen on
| granting permanent rights to some web page to ping me but
| I might be okay with doing so until I close the tab or
| the browser restarts.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| |