[trentonstrong]

I wish I could remember where I read this, or that my Google-fu was strong today, but not too long ago I read an article or mailing list post about (far-future) plans to get away from scrolling as a paradigm for navigating web pages. It is a sort of unquestioned dogma that content must be laid out vertically in a linear fashion. If I remember correctly, what was being proposed was something more contextual or reactive in nature, like flipping pages left and right or some other topology. That doesn't seem like it differs too much from hyperlinks so I must not be recalling some important fact.

Anyways, hopefully someone who knows more about what I'm trying to remember will see this.

[gujk]

We had pages before we had computers. Unbroken or variable-broken document flow was a feature computers added.

[dbvisel]

Historically: scrolls existed before pages, though pages were clearly the superior technology.

[kstenerud]

Pages were superior because:

1. Scrolls were more difficult to handle as you read.

2. You could jump around to various places in a long book document, but with a scroll you had to manually unravel it to the point you were looking for, a time consuming process.

3. Books were not without their difficulties, however: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

But in all seriousness, the scroll concept works perfectly well, in fact better than the book concept, provided you have the right technology to drive it. And modern computers have that technology. I can use a search box to jump to wherever I want. I can quickly scroll up and down in the document using a scroll bar rather than paging through a book.