Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
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.
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I didn't say the people didn't know how they work. I said they didn't know how they were calculated.
i.e., many people based their approval on a mistaken belief that they counted paragraphs, lines, or characters, or were needed for highlighting, etc. That would have been fine, if it were true.
I'll leave it at that, except to say that the proof of bad UI is in the results of a usability study, and those results are hard to deny, considering the never-ending negative feedback from users.
Anyway, I really shouldn't have responded, hard to ignore the repeated challenges as they were.
This subject is OT and the points from both sides have been posted covered ad nauseum in countless threads.