Richard Wallis proposed a new way of scrolling called MagicScroll. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this method?
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2It's not a new way of scrolling. It's pagination. It works great for books. The web isn't a book.– DA01Commented Jan 14, 2013 at 22:34
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Yuck. Give me smooth unpaginated scrolling any day. Even uninstalled Adobe Reader because it insist on sticky page boundaries when scrolling instead of showing me a view of the bottom half of one page and the top half of another.– Marjan VenemaCommented Jan 15, 2013 at 10:01
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@mcb You might add a description of this scrolling method - the demo might not work in all browsers nor is it necessairly available forever.– konturCommented Jan 19, 2013 at 18:06
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3 Answers
I can not see any advantages with this. My eyes kept focusing on the moving line and I was having a real hard time reading the text. I'd much rather read an article with properly formatted text, good use of contrast, line-spacing, margins and column width.
I feel like this is more comparable to pagination than to scrolling. The benefit is that you can see part of the previous page. The downside is that this is a distracting gimmick, and requires more effort to use than standard pagination. As long as paragraph breaks are used properly, it is incredibly easy to keep track of my position on the page.
If I really wanted to see the previous page and absolutely hated scrolling due to the movement, I would use a two column page layout which moves the right page to the left side and the next page the the right side on each page-down request. However, that would probably be distracting, since my brain would better remember the text position if I just used pagination and paged up.
I completely agree with tblessander. It's very difficult to read without losing focus on the text. Your eyes are naturally attracted to movement, so each line jump is very distracting.
I could see this being used in schools perhaps to teach children to read slowly line by line. Other than that, I don't see casual or even speed readers using this for any reason.
