103118 - (SavePosition) Bookmarks should remember document scrolling position

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Roland]

With a very long (really really long) documents it's often useful to be able to
get back to the specific location somewhere within the document. 
It would be a nice touch if the bookmarks could (optionally) remember not only
the url but also the scrolling position of the document at the moment of setting
a bookmark.

Comment 1

[xyzzy]

Two comments:

1) This is what <a name="foo"> is for.  Bookmark link.html#foo.  Evangelism.
2) Large files can change in more places than small ones.  If a file is 
modified, how do you determine the correct position of the slider?  If the 
answer is by fixed references, you are pretty much back to part 1.

Possible compromise:  When bookmarking a page containing <a name> tags, bookmark 
the first one that is "visible", or offer the option to do so.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

I often make bookmarks after reading an entire page.  It would be very strange 
if clicking on of the bookmarks took me to he bottom of the page I had 
bookmarked.

Btw, even pages without tables of contents sometimes contain named anchors.  
You can see them in view source or by using the named anchors bookmarklet 
<http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagedata.html#named_anchors>.

Comment 3

[Roland]

But again this should be OPTION. So when you have a large text file  (about 700
kb) and believe me I have met plenty of those in the net (You would be amazed
how few people out there know what the hell a named anchor is much less use
one), without any anchors, it makes sence to have such kind of bookmarks, that
do not only open the document but also scroll you to the location you want in it. 

I don't see the problem with the changing of the document. These long documents
are usually long tech refeences (often in pure text format) and as such tend to
stay unmodified. Not to mention that usually I end up downloading them to sabe
me some bandwidth (it's a real pain to view 700 kb documents over bad 56Kb modem
line).

And again I have to say that this should be OPTIONAL, some kind of advanced
bookmarking feature (a opt in checkbox in File Bookmark dialog), so everybody
can decide if they want to remember the scrolling position of the page...

But the idea about intelligently finding "active" closest anchor is not so bad
either. I'd say it should work roughly as follows:
  a) find the named anchor that is "visible"
  b) if that anchor is "near the top of the window", use it
  c) if not, find closest anchor above the viewable area
  d) if it's "close enough", use it.
  e) show the list of anchors to choose from (possibly with the help 
     of autocomplete widget)

Comment 4

[xyzzy]

Appreciate your comments, and agree with most of them, but what was I thinking 
before?  Why limit this to just named anchors?

XPath serves as a superset to named anchors, and would have fine enough 
granularity to bookmark any tag within a document, either explicitly (by ID) or 
implicitly (relative to document).  It is already being used in this capacity 
for page annotations, why not for bookmarks?

Yes, this would obviously need to be a pref or a gratuitous addition to the 
context menu, because it is so different from established intuition.  I leave it 
to others to decide whether or not this is worth it.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

this should probably be wontfix. if it isn't marked won'tfix then in should be
reassigned to UI Design for further discussion. if this is implemented without
further discussion that would be a bad thing.

Comment 6

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Paul Chen is now taking Bookmarks bugs. For your convenience, you can filter 
email notifications caused by this by searching for 'ilikegoats'.

Comment 7

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

off to UI design for discussion

Comment 8

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Roland, proposing something as an OPTION generally makes it less likely that it
will be accepted, not more -- because not only do you have the surprise caused
by the change in behavior, you also have the clutter and bloat caused by the
OPTION and the OPTION's interface.

For history items this request is quite reasonable (bug 47350, bug 99094, etc).
But if something's in your bookmarks, it's usually for one of two reasons:
(1) its contents changes fairly often, so you want to start from the beginning
    of the page each time you visit it;
(2) it's a central index for some information repository (e.g. a Web portal),
    and the main navigation for most such pages is at the top of the page
    anyway.

Wontfix.

Comment 9

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 162852, which asks for this as an option.