Scott’s post pointed out that people just don’t like to scroll horizontally. What are you? A bunch of pansies? Is it too difficult for your delicate hands? Up and down’s ok, but left and right… Wooh! Hold the boat!

Seriously though… I propose that people simply don’t want to scroll at all. It’s just that we’ve been forcibly accustomed to vertical scrolling for so long now that we don’t even notice it nor even think of it as a bad thing anymore. There’s just too much content to present. It has to all go somewhere. If we all had 60″x60″ monitors (and if the Internet loaded virtually instantaneously so that there’s no lag) then we could avoid scrolling all together. Now that would be heaven.

We’re an “at a glance” type of beast. We want all our content available at a glance. We want to be easily able to see all the important things at a glance. The more you have to scroll to see content, the less “at a glance”-ness your presentation has.

Think about it. We don’t particularly mind vertical scrolling nowadays (as long as it’s not too long). We all agree that it sucks when we have to scroll both vertically and horizontally. But if we also had to scroll on some z-axis… well, that would just be horrible, wouldn’t it?

It would be that much more scrolling to see all the content. And that’s what we’re to trying to minimize: the amount of scrolling. Therefore less scrolling = more betterness.