(Let's assume a vertical scrollbar for purpose of discussion.)

Doug Way wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
> Not a bad idea, although a square size scrollbar as a bare minimum
> sounds a little bit bigger than necessary... when you bring up a list
> of senders of "+", the square scrollbar would take up almost 1/3 of
> the vertical scroll region.  (I don't have a strong opinion on this,
> though.)

Hmm... yes, if the scrollbar has a tiny height things will get squeezed.
Windows does a sort of graceful degradation, first reducing the scroll
bar so that it never takes up more than about 1/3 of total height, then
removing the scroll bar and relying entirely on the single-line-scroll
arrows at the top and bottom of the scroll bar.

> > Another proposal: For a vertical scrollbar, add a horizontal dark
> > line in the middle. It's just for show, but it will make the visual
> > impression of "I am *right here*" much stronger. (Look at any
> > equalizer or any other real-world device with sliders: Most if not
> > all will have that middle line.)
> 
> Yeah, I've seen sliders with that line before, although I'm not sure
> if I've seen scrollbars like that.

I haven't seen such a scrollbar either :)

> The SGI (and the Mac) scrollbars both have a few lines of "texture"
> right in the middle of the bar which I like a little bit better...
> again, just for show, I'd guess.  (Maybe it gives you a sense of
> something to grab...)

Can't tell. I haven't seen these.

> I was thinking for a second when I read that that while the scrollbar
> represents the current page/portion that you can see of a larger
> region, the horizontal line could represent the selected item in a
> list, or the cursor location in a text area.  So, you could draw a
> line (or something) at the top 1/4 of the bar if the cursor location
> in the text area is 1/4 way up the viewable area.  If the cursor
> location were above the currently viewed area, the marker would appear
> above the bar (in the blue scroll region).

I'm a bit cautious about this. It sounds like an idea that one could
pursue, but I fear there is not enough space to make the horizontal
position hint both visible and unobtrusive.
But then it could be useful to try it out.

> This could be cool...  are there any existing scrollbars that do this?

I don't think so.
Native GUIs don't need this as they display scrollbars on a permanent
basis. So if horizontal position is an issue, they just allocate a
horizontal scrollbar and are done.

Regards,
Joachim
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