scrollbars and viewports, margins, padding, and layers of abstraction
Has a windowing system existed that has done its own scrollbars, rather than leaving it to the application (including GUI toolkits)? Imagine if the application drew to virtual framebuffer (one of several possible names) of one size, and the user had their window sized to a smaller size, and the window manager (or windowing system) gave the user the way to move around the viewport thus existing, whether by scrollbars, some kind of dragging, scaling, or how ever it does it. There's an obvious usability issue in porting existing applications, already doing their own scroll bars, to such an environment, because who wants two sets of scroll bars for the same thing. So we have to also imagine that applications running in this environment are designed for this environment, not shoe-horned in, tho some shoe-horning would be inevitable should a transition occur, at a later stage. Processes exist in an environment operated by the OS. The whole promise of OS was: to each pro...