Re: A Violent Realisation [Was: Preferences]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ben Ford <ben kalifornia com> writes: 
> I read this as saying, "Application authors should write complex logic
> to deal with every possible situation so that we, as platform
> designers, do not have to do so.  If it does not do this then it is
> 'broken and smoking crackrock'."
> 
> Is this incorrect?
> 

Yes. On every other platform apps are expected to adapt to small
screen size. 

While viewports are a fine workaround for an app that can't be made to
fit on 800x600, using an app across multiple viewports certainly sucks
more than having a scrollbar in the app. I'd definitely consider it an
application bug if I _had_ to use viewports to use the app.

I don't think a scrollbar or ggv-style drag-scrolling (or keyboard
shortcut scrolling) are particularly complex, they are standard GUI
features. Pressing PageDown to scroll the app down isn't fundamentally
doing somehting different than pushing alt-downarrow to go to the
viewport below; either way I'm now viewing the bottom half of the app.

Which isn't to say it isn't nice to have the workaround available -
maybe it is - though I wonder if we can't come up with a better
workaround for this specific issue, and you still have to weigh that
workaround vs. its costs. So you have to think through the whole
question.

Havoc