Question

I want to make it so that a webpage automatically scrolls to a certain element, however I don’t want the scrolling to fight user input– If it begins to scroll and then the user scrolls, I want the automated scrolling to stop and let the user have full control.

So I originally thought I could do something like this:

var animatable = $('body, html');
animatable.animate({scrollTop: $('#foo').offset()}, 1000);

$(window).scroll(function() { animatable.stop(); });

however, the problem is– the animation of the scrollTop triggers the scroll event handler for window! So, the animation begins and then stops immediately.

I am looking for a way that I can make my window scroll event handler only stop if it’s triggered by user input… Is this possible?

Answer 1

Diode’s solution didn’t work for me – scroll() didn’t differentiate between the animation and the user, meaning the animation stopped immediately. From a different post, the following works for me (modified for this purpose):

// Assign the HTML, Body as a variable...
var $viewport = $('html, body');

// Some event to trigger the scroll animation (with a nice ease - requires easing plugin )...
$('#element').click(function() {
    $viewport.animate({ 
        scrollTop: scrollTarget // set scrollTarget to your desired position
    }, 1700, "easeOutQuint");
});

// Stop the animation if the user scrolls. Defaults on .stop() should be fine
$viewport.bind("scroll mousedown DOMMouseScroll mousewheel keyup", function(e){
    if ( e.which > 0 || e.type === "mousedown" || e.type === "mousewheel"){
         $viewport.stop().unbind('scroll mousedown DOMMouseScroll mousewheel keyup'); // This identifies the scroll as a user action, stops the animation, then unbinds the event straight after (optional)
    }
});