Jump to top button

[rebelsheart]

Title:
Jump to top button

Area:
Entries, Reading Page

Summary:
Implement a "jump to top" button similar the the one present on most Tumblr blogs. Also implement a "jump to bottom" button.

Description:
Tumblr is essentially a graphics-heavy Twitter - which is to say it has a different purpose and function in life than Dreamwidth. Many of their design elements would be inappropriate here. However, I think that the "jump to top" button that appears when you've begun to scroll down a Tumblr blog or dashboard would be wildly helpful.

Along the same lines, a "jump to bottom" button would also be helpful on reading pages, allowing users to quickly determine if they need to go back another page to see if there are more entries they should read since the last time they looked.

Poll #9371 Jump to top button

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 71

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
11 (15.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
32 (45.1%)

(I have no opinion)
27 (38.0%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.4%)

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

Can you link to an example of what you mean? Seeing as there is already a 'back to top' link in most styles I guess you mean something else but I can't see what as I'm not familiar with Tumblr.

[rebelsheart]

I would love to, but it's part of Tumblr's dashboard feature - which means you need to be logged in.

So I made a video instead :)

http://livestre.am/1gA49

[ninetydegrees]

Get it now! Thank you very much!

[marahmarie]

There is because I submitted a suggestion for it which got migrated and implemented a while back. So this suggestion confused me at first, too.

[ratcreature]

Is this useful for people who access things with some non-computer device? I mean, I never use these buttons because my keyboard has keys for going to the top and the bottom of a page, and I don't own a tablet or smartphone or such and don't know their navigation. For the jump buttons are just clutter on the page, but I guess if the top/bottom keys are not universal such a button might be useful.

[rebelsheart]

I know that there are people who rely upon the keyboard for navigation, this feature really wouldn't beenfit them.

I vaguely remember being taught almost 20 years ago that "Home" and "End" should jump to the top and bottom of a page, but they haven't done that for me since at least 2002.

I've linked a video in an earlier reply to show what I'm thinking of.

Tumblr has a mobile app for smartphones and tablets and other touchscreen devices. There's not a jump to top feature in those apps, but in most apps and i can swipe my finger fast and get the same effect.

[ratcreature]

For me that Tumblr feature doesn't really work very well. It appears sometimes, but not consistently, so I never got in the habit of using it, because it is kind of a Schödinger's button. Sometimes there when I scrolled for a bit, sometimes it never shows, and I can't reproduce it. So Tumblr's specific implementation of the floating button rather ticks me off.

[marahmarie]

Wordpress (.org, not .com) has a plugin with a nice implementation of this that was responsive and always right there when I needed it. I used it for the three weeks or so that I had my own website and liked it better than the traditional back-to-top links we use here. That said, in its current WP implementation, it's load-intensive so it can slow the page down somewhat. I have mixed feelings abut implementing anything like it here unless the devs make it fast and responsive without compromising page speed or usability.

[azurelunatic]

The device that this might benefit me on would be my phone, although I am not sure how well it would load or work on my phone. On the desktop I use the keyboard for this.

[laitaine]

I have keyboard shortcuts that do this already. I feel this would unnecessarily add more clutter to pages.

[turlough]

Exactly!

[opusculus]

I would say keep it small and turn-offable, because yeah, I do see the risk of clutter here. But personally, my trial run for Tumblr suggests that I'd use it and find it convenient once I started remembering that it was there, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

[musyc]

I only see this feature as useful when people have turned on the "infinite scroll" function of Tumblr. As an infinite scroll doesn't exist on DW and layouts have do have a "back to top" anchor (I want to say in all layouts, but I don't know), I'm not understanding what the purpose would be of this. Are you wanting a hovering sort of top-arrow that would follow you instead of the single anchor at the bottom of the page?

[rebelsheart]

That's exactly what I'm looking for. I may not always be at the bottom of a page and have a desire to go back to the top.

[arethinn]

Not in all layouts, I don't think, or at least, the journal owner could alter the style to turn it off. I think this is something that should be controllable by journal owner (so the style looks the way they want) and not the user (i.e. demand imposed by the site).

[tyger]

I find floating anything incredibly annoying, personally, because they often float on the top of things you want to see (particularly if your browser is smaller than whatever arbitrary minimum size standard is today). Also, in my personal experience, the more of those sort of features you have on a page, the slower it loads, and the more likely something's going to go wrong and the page gets borked and unnavigable.

[msilverstar]

+1

[arethinn]

+1

I often have problems with floating things interacting in weird ways with my large font size (so ferex, a link that the designer assumed would be easily clickable because they assumed a certain font size winds up being under the floaty thing and inaccessible).

[kaberett]

+1

I also get very twitchy about things SUDDENLY APPEARING, scrolling slower than the page (so getting dragged partially off the top/bottom of a screen), etc.

[azurelunatic]

... you know, if the navbar could be convinced to float at the top of the page for whatever bit of it one's on (is that an obnoxious enough behavior on a small screen that it should be an option?) something like this could be put into the navbar without floating overtop anything important, and it would always be there and always be accessible for anyone who needed it, without necessarily getting in the way of everybody else.

Also, I wonder if there are enough random things that would be useful on the navbar that a modular navbar would be useful.

[rebelsheart]

That would be really, really handy.

[laitaine]

That is the first thing I hack when I use a new layout, it's incredibly useful to have it there all the time and it's very simple to do. (And any layouts I make do it automagically.) I access DW via an enormous desktop screen, a moderate-sized laptop and my iphone and that behaviour is never annoying and always useful (for me, ymmv).

I think a modular navbar would be useful, because there's stuff on the navbar I use all the time and other stuff I never use, and yet more stuff not there that would be cool. There is an issue with how to gracefully handle when the amount of stuff overflows the amount of screen real estate. With a sidebar it's just a case of sticking stuff on the bottom, but width is limited. You don't want to have to scroll horizontally to see the whole nav bar, or have multiple rows of navbar options, so that the thing takes up a lot of space - a thin navbar sitting discretely at the top is one thing, a great big beast of a navbar hogging screen space is another. And having drop-down menus for everything would take away its functionality, for me anyway.

[tyger]

One of the things I've noticed with that sort of floating thing is that if you page down with a keyboard shortcut, instead of scroll, whatever's at the top of the now-paged-down page is hidden under the floating thing, so you have to scroll back up a bit every time. (Or at least I think that's what you're suggesting? Always floating up the top there?) So if there isn't a way to deal with that it's likely to get really annoying, really quickly.

[matgb]

That's something that happens in Firefox, but not in Chrome, Chrome seems to interpret 'page down' as meaning 'page minus a bit'. Not sure which I prefer but I'm back to Fx overall, and yeah, it is annoying. I personally dislike floating stuff, but I've used it a few times.

@OP and others, you could easily have a floating top/bottom link on most layouts, top can be done without an S2 hacking just CSS, LMK if you want me to figure out the code and/or help.

[denise]

Irritatingly enough, Chrome's "page minus a bit" still doesn't clear the gigantic fucking bar they've got on top of everything with the "new" google look.

</offtopic>

[arethinn]

Fuck Google's recent redesigns all to hell. Some whitespace is good -- some. But not that much.

My husband speculated that whoever is designing over there these days must be using, like, dual QSXGA screens or some crap. Unlike all us HD 1080 plebes.

You want I should drive the few miles to Mountain View and rough 'em up, bozz?

</offtopic>

[tyger]

It seems to depend on the individual website, in Safari. Which might mean there is something that can be done about it, but yeah. Annoying.

[azurelunatic]

That would have to be dealt with.

[kaberett]

I would absolutely hate this. I really, really detest things that float at the top of the page, don't scroll as smoothly as the rest of the page, take up screen real estate on my netbook that I could be using to READ THINGS (especially with large text!), etc.

[florentinescot]

or maybe make the header/navigation bar at the top of the page "persistent" -- so that it stays put when you scroll ....

[deborah]

I'd be interested in running this by the folks at dw_accessibility and seeing if there's any feedback there. On the one hand, my instinct is that this could be a real accessibility win for some people. On the other hand, multiple people have pointed out that keyboard users will already be using key mappings for this, and the nature of a hovering Ajax key like that is that it's not going to be easy to make it super-accessible to a lot of people.

But it really could be, if I can only think of the right use cases. Which is why I'd be interested in running it by that community.

[jeshyr]

For my particular use case (large print, control via keyboard and mouse) it's hideous accessibility because anything floating gets enlarged along with the print and therefore covers over whatever should be behind it. On G+ their evil evil evil floating header bars cover fully a third of the browser window on my twenty six inch screen!!!!!!!

Things that float never come correctly in tab order anyway, but I guess in this case that wouldn't matter so much since if you're a keyboard user presumably you have the home/end keys around?

[noracharles]

I wouldn't want any floating element. As long as it would be opt in so I would never see it whether logged in or logged out that would be fine.

[sorchasilver]

+1