I’m currently reading a very long post about Wikileaks, a rant by Bruce Sterling (The Blast Shack). Sterling specialises in rants, though for rants I find them pretty readable. It’s long, and apparently it’s generated a lot of comments. Now maybe I should have checked first but I’m part-way through and I’d like to know how much of Sterling’s writing I’ve got left before the comments start (which I’ll probably only skim). So how do I check without losing my place?
It’s got me thinking about something I’d like to see in web design to help long-form reading: a graphic ticker tape-like bar on the side of the screen that shows the proportion of the page that’s the story and the proportion that’s comments, plus a marker to show where I’m up to. That can’t be too hard can it?
Vaguely related reading: if:book’s a defense of pagination.