The problem
Today's modern websites may use infinite scrolling technique to replace paged lists to make a more seamless experience to their users.
This is all nice and dandy as long as users don't scroll to far down which means that your document becomes very complex with huge amounts of DOM nodes. There are of course ways to mitigate this problem (i.e. replacing over-top overflowed scrolled elements with a single DIV of appropriate height for example), but they're either complex to implement and they still have their flaws.
The idea
I was thinking if anyone has already seen an implementation where items, that get scrolled out (top or bottom) somehow become smaller and fainter until they disappear and get replaced by its adjacent item.
I'm thinking of a mix of experience of:
- scrolling
- fading
- scaling
Fading and scaling can be seen on Medium.com when you get to the bottom of any article and you click the next recommended one displayed below (click the title). When you do click and if you pay attention you can see the effect of original article disappearing while being replaced by an up-sliding new article. Content scrolling could be done in this way and infinite scrolling would be much smoother and less resource consuming as elements would get replaced on the fly and in-place.
Number of simultaneously displayed items of course depends on items' size. In case of Medium-line articles it would likely be one article that would also scroll until you'd scroll it to the very bottom (or top). In case of posts like Facebook, it would be many more items simultaneously as they don't take as much vertical space.
Coverflow works in somewhat similar way as it displays middle content completely and rest is either hidden or scaled/transformed.
The question
Has anybody seen such an implementation on the web? If done properly it would actually make a much nicer infinite scrolling experience without hogging our browsers.
But to make my question more clear and non-debatable. Can you provide a working (albeit simplified) example of such experience?
Requirements:
- when an item gets scrolled out it disappears (using fade/scale/both)
- when items appear at the bottom (or top when scrolled up) they should display in the opposite to scrolled out items
- pressing usual scrolling buttons Home, End, Page Up, Page Down and Space should work.
- invisible items should be removed from DOM
- scrolling should somehow be available using some sort of scrollbar as well