Closed Bug 1455277 Opened 6 years ago Closed 2 years ago

Improve UX for auto-dir scrolling

Categories

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, enhancement, P3)

enhancement

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1772276
Tracking Status
firefox61 --- affected

People

(Reporter: zjz, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: dev-doc-needed)

If you have any thoughts on this, please comment on it.

I am also wondering if there are any UX folks in Mozilla who should look into unimplemented UX solutions.
Flags: needinfo?(masayuki)
Flags: needinfo?(bugmail)
Since there were feedbacks from Nightly users who aren't used to the auto-dir behaviour, so I temporarily disabled auto-dir by default so that we have time to rethink an improved UX solution without affecting the end users.

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Here is my personal proposal of an improved UX solution:

Item 1: Restricting the scrolling feature for only vertical writing targets.
Item 2: Removing the honouring root feature.

Item 2 is to simplify the logic of code. If Item 1 is implemented, then use cases of the auto-dir feature will be significantly restricted to much fewer websites(Because so far almost all the *scrollable* targets are in horizontal writing mode), so we no longer need to keep honouring root feature as it unnecessarily complicates code.

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I think the advantages of the proposal are:

1. The first advantage is that it's safe.
It completely goes with the established scrolling habit for horizontal writing targets while still providing convinent horizontal scrolling for vertical writing targets. So far, scrollable vertical writing targets are rarely seen, that is to say, the user's scrolling habit in vertical writing mode has not been established. So, the issue of breaking habit shouldn't exist for vertical writing targets.

2. The second advantage is that it only focues on practical use cases.
Because convinent horizontal scrolling is much more practical for vertical writing targets then for horizontal ones. In horizontal writing targets which have horizontal scrollbars, the overflowed horizontal content tend to be only a very few long lines and typically the overflowed content are not so important. But in such vertical writing targets, things are quite different, the overflowed content typically means all the unread paragraphs which have a much higer necessity to be read.
I don't really have that much experience with vertical text behaviour and don't have any strong opinions on this. If you want wider feedback it might be worth posting on the dev-platform or firefox-dev mailing lists. In theory somebody from the UX team should have an opinion but in my experience it's hard to get any actual response from them.
Blocks: autodir
Flags: needinfo?(bugmail)
See Also: → 1455007
I submitted a proposal on csswg-drafts Github https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2602, if anyone is interested in the discussion, please comment on it. Thanks.
Flags: needinfo?(masayuki)
Priority: -- → P3
Autodir is covered briefly near the bottom of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Experimental_features#DOM. When it becomes enabled by default, we need to find a home for mentioning it in the main documentation body, so I've added dev-doc-needed to the bug.
Keywords: dev-doc-needed
Thanks for documenting it, Eric. Since the feature is disabled even in Nightly for the UX issue, I re-edited the document.

I submitted an issue to the CSSWG for a better UX solution at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2602, and the issue right now is still pending.
Component: Event Handling → User events and focus handling
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 2 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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