Calculation to determine how far to scroll the page

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You know how, when you visit a web site, various parts of the display are loaded at different times: title, body of article, ads on the left, ads on the right, ads with text flowing around it, that band at the top that tells you what site you are visiting.

Once everything is loaded, you start to read the article, reach the bottom of the page, and press PageDown to read what’s next. Only, “what’s next” is covered up by that band at the top that tells you what site you are visiting. It appears that the developer that created the web page has forgotten to include the vertical height of the band in the ScrollPage.

Except that forgotten height adjustment to the size of the ScrollPage command seems to have infected nearly every commercial web site available. Can it really be that all of those programmers made that same, stupid mistake?

Not bloody likely!

If hundreds (thousands?) of web sites have the same “mistake” in them, it seems to me that this is not a mistake at all, that it was purposefully added to create that exact effect.

So, either all of those programmers are making the same mistake and never correcting them, or there is a perfectly good reason for them to code those pages like that.

What is that reason?

2

Try a different browser?

3

Can you give an example of a page that demonstrates what you’re talking about? I’m not really picturing it.

4

I just hit the space bar,the whole screen moves down

5

Go to Yahoo’s home page (https://www.yahoo.com). At the top is the frame for the browser display area, containing all of the controls and links that the browser offers. Just below that is the Yahoo! banner, with a dark bar at its top showing various options: Home, Mail, Answers, etc. At the far right in that bar is a link to upgrade to Firefox. Below the black bar is the main portion of the banner, proudly exclaiming “Yahoo!”, followed by an input box for “Search Web”, some icons for my account and mail. Below that is the “Trending” area, with several links to trending topics.

All the way to the right, I can see the vertical scroll bar. When I am at the top of the page, it looks like the banner at the top of the frame is part of the page that would scroll when I press [PageDown]. Once I press the down-arrow key, that banner grows an edge and it becomes clear that the banner does not move at all; in fact, you can watch the top of the page slide up under that banner as you press the down arrow button or click on the down arrow in the scroll bar.

When I press [PageDown], or click below the slider button, or, as Jtur88 suggested, press the space bar, the page scrolls up by the exact amount it would need if the banner were not there at all. Since the banner is there, however, part of the page has scrolled up under the banner, and cannot be seen without moving the page down until that part is revealed.

If this only happened in Chrome, I could see that perhaps changing my browser would do the trick, but it happens in IE as well.

If it were only one web site that did this, I could believe that one single website had a programmer that did not know how to compensate for that when they set the scroll amount. But it happens on most web sites that I visit, and that leads me to believe that this “feature” was purposely coded for this behavior, otherwise, why would so website feature this “mistake”?

6

I’m still not entirely sure what your question or beef is, but it looks like a) Yahoo has infinite scrolling set-up and b) lots of websites that have infinite scrolling also lock the header in place so it’s easy to get “home”.

I grab the scroll bar to scroll, almost exclusively, so I’m not sure what “page down to read what’s next” means. If you want to get back to the top, to the list of headlines, you can just hit the home key.

7

Web programmers have no control over and pay no mind to what your “page down” button does. That is something decided by your browser.

8

That’s not entirely true, for two reasons. The first being that you can capture keyboard button presses and handle scrolling yourself–though doing so would be rather strange.

The other thing you can do is not make the navigation part an overlay. Have it be a fixed section of the page, and have a scrollable part below this.

It’s really annoying on mobile, where the browser isn’t fast enough to actually keep the banner locked in place, so you get weird effects on the screen. I don’t know why no mobile site seems to take this into account.