Discuss Scott McCloud's current online comic project. Be sure to check out <a href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/mi/mi.html">the latest improv</a>!
Last week I finally finished putting together a trails-based webcomic I've been trying to get off the ground for...well, way too long. While I was tweaking the format, my dad suggested putting some anchors into the comic so that websurfers could jump to certain parts of the story.
I responded that I planned to post the story one whole "page" at a time, and there wasn't much point in jumping to a particular part of a new page. Readers wouldn't gain anything from it, they'd just end up missing part of the story.
However, it occurs to me that it would be *very* useful to have an anchor at the end of the Morning Improv. Instead of linking to the page and scrolling through to find the new panels every day, you could just click on a link that would take you straight to the latest installment. How 'bout it, Scott?
From an HTML standpoint, do anchors work in horizontal space? If the comic was running down the page, that would help, but I don't know if the common browsers are built with an infinite-to-the-right canvas in mind.
From the standpoint of my personal viewing pleasure, this one has been a bit annoying. It's just large enough that it won't fit vertically in the window without flipping up the navigation toolbar. However, I recognize that every day I'm a bit more of an anachronism for using my computer at 800x600.
Wikkit wrote:From an HTML standpoint, do anchors work in horizontal space?
I think that's not so much a question of the HTML standpoint but what browsers are able to do and therein lies the crux. I saved the whole part 2 of the current Improv to my harddrive and then played around with the HTML file in Dreamweaver and (maybe I didn't do it right, though), at least IE 6.0 won't interpret anchor links whose goals are somewhere else on a horizontal line.
Hm. I just did a quick test in IE6 and Firebird 0.7 (both on Win2K) and it worked fine for me. I put one anchor tag around image 91 and another one around image 90 and neither browser had any difficulty auto-scrolling to either location. Maybe you did it differently than I did.
As to the point about the daily readers vs. the every-now-and-then-ers, I'd think that the main link could be for the page as a whole and there could be a smaller link for the latest panel. Not a big deal, and satisfies both cases.
Of course, it's all moot if Scott doesn't care for the idea.
sometimes on image layouts, I noticed clicking to an "anchor", and then the browser window pushes that point downward anyway because the images are still downloading and pushing the ones below them out of the way. it's only with a certain browser option, I think. but sometimes it annoyed me.
I'd rather browse through the entire thing anyway each time I click it. partly because I think it's fun, and secondly, (with Walrus) when there are 2 new panels in one day, the top one will load and I'll have to wait a while for the bottom one. and if the bottom panel takes place just before the top one, it spoils it all for me! a petty nitpicking thing.
Derek Kirk Kim puts his new panels on the front page, but I end up clicking to see the whole thing anyway, because I'm constantly forgetting what happened in the panel from a few days ago.
Haze wrote:sometimes on image layouts, I noticed clicking to an "anchor", and then the browser window pushes that point downward anyway because the images are still downloading and pushing the ones below them out of the way.
Excellent point. Of course, my test was with images that had already been cached by the browser, so I didn't experience that problem, but in other situations, this would probably happen.
Well, I think even if more basic problems were found out, I don't think it would change the fact that this seems like it would be a good idea for some readers while for others it would not. So wouldn't it be a good solution to let the readers give the option for both solutions? A link in the way it always has been and one that anchors the latest panel?
