Quote:
Originally Posted by Piper_
Has nothing to do with "old mentalities." 
It is the geek in me that recognizes that locations are bad UI and hates using them. Most people I see lauding them don't have a clue how they are calculated, and they attribute things to them that they do not do, as if highlights and such rely on locations for precision.
Aside from the numbers that require too much calculation and the crazy "1357-64" display of range, the worst is related to the fact that no one can predict or figure how many locations they are looking at. You can have one full screen of text that holds 50 locations, and the next full screen holds 10 locations.
All of that is flat-out bad UI, so no one should be surprised at the negative reception.
They also can't be standardized, and have no future as the disparity would only get worse as ebooks became more sophisticated. |
I disagree. The people who laud them know exactly how they work: you enter a number and you go back to that same point each time with far more precision than a typical printed page, regardless of display page size. They do not need to know any more about how they work. That's good. While there's not way to easily know how many locations you are looking at, short of estimating byte counts, there is also no need to. The ranged display is a confusing UI choice, I agree. They opted for detail over clarity.
They certainly can be standardized. It simply may not be the Kindle standard that is adopted. It is certainly possible to define a single standard of representing precise position in an ebook, and stuff like multimedia and other features can be accommodated. It's a virtual certainty that not everyone will like or follow a standard, though.