develwoutacause’s avatardevelwoutacause’s Twitter Archive—№ 820

        1. I really like @googledocs's page-less layout. It makes a lot of sense now that we have scroll bars for everything. But I find the one aspect I miss is the lack of a page count. It's hard to estimate how long a document is without it and I'm feeling really conflicted.
      1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
        I could look at word count, but I don't have a mental model to use as a frame of reference. Is 1,000 words a lot? "How big is the scrollbar?" is probably the closest comparison, but varies by device and is harder to communicate to others ("one viewport" = "one pager"?)
    1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
      But it also makes me critical of page count as a meaningful metric on its own: * 1 novel page != 1 textbook page. * Font and page sizes are not consistent. * Graphics and charts may make things "longer" or "shorter" depending on context and importance to the document.
  1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
    So at the end of all this I just feel very conflicted and lost about what "document length" really means to a human being. Is it word count, informational volume/density, cognitive load, all of the above? And yet still "page count" just *feels* like the best metric to me. 🤷