Expanding dropdown text at bottom of window

[Rona Kwestel]

When a dropdown element appears at the bottom of the window (in either WebHelp or HTML Help), clicking on it "exposes" the hidden text, but the user still can't see it because it's below the visible area of the window. The user then has to scroll down to see the exposed content. This is very poor UI design.

In the following two screenshots using Madcap's own WebHelp, you can see that when I clicked on Language Support at the bottom of the right pane, the scrollbar at the right got smaller, indicating that the window has more content than before, but it did not scroll the content into view for me:

Initial Display.gif

Expand Dropdown.gif

In contrast, if you look at the behavior of the TOC pane in WebHelp, clicking on a folder at the bottom of the pane does indeed scroll down automatically to reveal the items underneath that folder that have now been exposed. This is the same behavior I would expect for a dropdown element at the bottom of the window.

In the following screenshot, after clicking on How to Develop a Project, it automatically scrolled down so that I could see the folders underneath (you can't really tell from this screenshot that I didn't scroll it myself, but you can try it for yourself at http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare):

Expand TOC Folder.gif

Am I missing something? Is there a way to get the behavior I want? Should I report it as a defect?

[LTinker68]

Maybe it's because you did a drop-down effect instead of an text expanding effect or a toggler. Not sure if a toggler will do it either. As for the TOC, that's a different effect, more of an expanding menu.

Not sure if that's typical HTML behavior or if it is something MadCap can fix. Either way, submit a bug report at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.

In the meantime, you could enter a blank paragraph or two after the revealed text, so that the drop-down hotspot isn't at the very bottom of the page. Don't know if that will scroll the window down, but most people drag the bar down as far as it goes, so if there's an extra blank space then that'll be at the bottom of the page, so when the text is revealed they'll at least see the first line and will scroll down at that point.

[NorthEast]

You're not missing anything, and unfortunately there's no workaround that I know of that you can use to get the page to scroll.
Drop-downs, togglers, and expanding text will all do the same (they all work the same way behind the scenes).

You can see the same thing happen in other help systems too, e.g. Windows XP help.

[Rona Kwestel]

It seems like there should be no technical reason why this feature couldn't be implemented. If the TOC pane can be scrolled, why not the content pane? And clearly the browser knows that more content was just added, since you can see the size of the scrollbar handle decrease, indicating that a smaller percentage of the (increased) available content is being displayed. On that basis, I will submit a bug report.

[KevinDAmery]

I think you'll find that that's the way browsers behave - when you expand a dropdown or other expandable content, they change the size of the page but do not change your location in the page. Point being, yes, it would be nice if it behaved differently, but I don't think it's Madcap's bug. You'd need to get the browser developers (Microsoft, Mozilla, WebKit, etc.) to change how their products work.