Saturday, April 11, 2015
Confused scroll
After organizing and archiving my latest courseware, I went back and organized the paperwork and contracts and proposals from previous years, with a real paper file folder for each year; then located all the old CDs and put them into appropriate years. I'd forgotten how LONG this thing has been running: the first proposals and plans were in '94, and the first actual sales in '96, I think.
From the start I decided to arrange the screen like a book, with images and animations on the left and text and answer-buttons on the right. This seemed obvious as a textbook metaphor, and it was fresh at the time. It's become dull over the years, but still works.
Here's a puzzle. The Web was designed around the same time (mid-90s), using the same generation of computers and monitors. Why wasn't the Web also arranged like a book from the start? TV screens, and thus computer screens, have always been 'landscape', which holds left and right pages nicely.
Why did we end up (until quite recently) with everything arranged vertically like a scroll? Even worse, why is the scroll's internal chronology confused? If you're a medieval scribe writing a journal on a (very long!) scroll, you don't write your latest entry from the top of the scroll down to the top of the previous entry. That's logically impossible. You write at the bottom of everything, which is also the bottom of the latest entry.
The existing arrangement requires a two-way thought pattern. You scroll DOWN 'forward in time' within one item, then you scroll DOWN 'backward in time' to find previous items.
It doesn't make any sense.
The existing arrangement requires a two-way thought pattern. You scroll DOWN 'forward in time' within one item, then you scroll DOWN 'backward in time' to find previous items.
It doesn't make any sense.
Labels: Alternate universe
¶ 12:22 PM
