Date Picker Show & Tell Part 2

[Antranig Basman]

Hi there - just a little clarification of my own -
Much as with the inline-edit "special characters" family of issues, when I mean to say
that this is a "technical issue" I don't specifically mean "this is a technical issue 
which we can't think how to resolve" but "this is an issue which has a technical 
origin, but whose fixes have costs whose implications are too awful to contemplate" :)

I hate to sound like a "developer who meddles in usability" but from what I can see,
the issues of a widget whose presence changes the absolute size of the viewport 
unexpectedly, or still worse, causes scrollbars to appear which the user would have
to manipulate to successfully use the control (or worse still causes the viewport to
jump) is a usability nightmare. The unexpected appearance of spurious scrollbars is,
for example, one of the more serious beefs we have against iframes. 
"Am I wrong?"
 :P
Cheers,
Antranig.


Eli Cochran wrote:
> 
> Just a little clarification on what I tested and the results. Erin's comments are
> essentially correct but I want to rephrase it slightly so that there isn't any
> confusion.
> 
> I tested what happens when a page is scrolled to the bottom of the browser window
> (geekily known as the viewport) and an absolutely positioned element is popped-up
> (displayed) at or near the bottom of a page with part of the element extending below the
> bottom edge of the browser window.
> 
> As expected the size of the page is extended so that the scrolling area of browser
> encompasses the displayed item and the user can scroll to the bottom of the absolutely
> positioned element.
> 
> This test was done with Firefox.
> 
> - Eli
> 
> On Dec 2, 2008, at 9:19 AM, Erin Yu wrote:
> 
> > We had a productive discussion about the date and time picker with Antranig and
> > Jonathan at the all-hands.  One of the technical concerns was that since the time
> > picker wheel is fixed around the text field, it might get cut off when the text field
> > is at the very bottom of the page. Eli did a quick test and was able to tell us that
> > when the the time picker pops up at the bottom of the page, the extra area of the page
> > can become scrollable to show the full length of the time picker.
> >