Re: scroll bar and drop down list usability

[Ken Fox <kfox vulpes com>]

Jim Gettys wrote:
> putting what amounts to a bar graph into the scroll bar where the
> height of the bar is proportional to the length of the line that would
> be displayed.

Cool. Very similar to putting chapter/section/paragraph/etc. markers
into the scrollbar. The advantage would be that text markup doesn't have
to be standardized to put a simple bar graph in the scrollbar. This
kind of a scrollbar is really just a degenerate panner isn't it?

> I saw this almost 15 years ago being done by Mike Hawley and Sam Leffler:
> why this idea hasn't been picked up in the meanwhile is a mystery to me.

Doesn't it seem like user interfaces have stagnated in general lately?
One of the reasons I think X has worked so well for the last 20 (!) years
is that the GUI hasn't evolved much from the Xerox Star days.

- Ken