Note to designers: stop overlaying divs on top of your main body content. Users press the Page Down key, and it obscures the first text lines of the next page under the navigation, or top banner, or whatever you've placed so cleverly up there.
It's frustrating, impedes the reader's experience, and makes people not want to bother with your content.
It breaks scrolling too -- if you scroll more than a few pixels down the page, the div jumps position and all the text moves vertically. Really horrible UX
That's why I don't understand why people are so opposed to good ol' <frame>s. You could resize them AND they wouldn't torture you if you used page down/space key...
It's hard to get more optimal than "read a page of text" "press button for next page". Scroll wheels require some combination of
* Have to move it more to travel the same distance
* Have to fiddle with it to get exactly one page
* Have to track your position during the scroll
* Have to scroll more often than once per page
This (among numerous other near-universal UX transgressions) has gotten to the point that my first action on almost any internet article is to hit ⇧⌘R.
I've always read at the center of the page while scrolling. It's what I've noticed most everyone my age doing. Maybe it's generational, I've only been at this since windows ME.
I use space for page down and shift+space for page up. Scrolling means tracking where I am as I go, when I hit page down I know where to start reading, the top. It feels more like reading a book.
Maybe because he wants to go exactly one page down as easily as possible, and this is something that has generally worked for decades. It's pretty simple, really.
It's frustrating, impedes the reader's experience, and makes people not want to bother with your content.
Okay, done with my UX rant. Sorry. Thanks.