Re: [9fans] panning or scrolling, page(1)

[okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp]

>I strongly prefer the panning model to the scrolling model. 

Yes, I had thought you'd done it already, which made me hesitate to open
this discussion.  ^_^

>  Are you really asking for
>some indication of what part of the image is visible?  

yes, I do, for images we are dealing with.  Let's think of a Mars Global Surveyor 
image, which usually has a very vertically long rectangular size, say such that
1024x5632.   In such case, we can never see it in a window, but only in some
part a once.

If we use panning model without any indication of position information (page91), 
it's not easy to image what part we are now seeing, which leads us some difficulty
to get that whole image in our mind.  Viewing a part always with getting its whole 
image is very important to us to find something from that image.   Therefore, we 
added vertical/horizontal scrollbars here, which enables us to get the idea 
1)what size of the whole image, 2) what position we are now seeing.

>that at the cost of a crappy interface, but there's no reason at all why a
>panning interface can't give you some indication of what subset of the

We've also considered the possiblity, with panning interface,  to have some 
small woindow which shows us the whole image size and its position.   
However, I don't see any reason this is a better idea than scrollbars...

In the case of documents, those have position information in themselves, and
we don't need such in our user interface.   This is the reason why I thought
page(1) was originally designed for documents.

Kenji