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Comment by branko_d | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like the term “cursor-based” pagination. Database cursors are different from this, have been around for decades, and can actually be used to implement pagination (albeit with requiring the transaction to be kept alive between pages which can be… problematic).

Perhaps, “token-based” pagination would be a better term?

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I agree. I was unsure if the author meant db cursors which would be keeping transactions alive. That has obvious scaling issues. But reading the comments here has me convinced they are talking about application generated cursors. I think this is a pretty reasonable confusion and it would benefit from added clarity, like naming them differently.

> Perhaps, “token-based” pagination would be a better term?

Let's do it. When I was first learning about it, I wondered how the concept related to database cursors, if at all.

It's really just a pointer to the next item at its most simple. But it really is just any opaque blob. Maybe you want it to be a jwt/encrypted blob with a request counter so you can track request usage by specific accounts (along with the pointer). jk that's probably a terrible idea (too entangled). Idk, just came up with it. Point is, you could do something like that, it's just a blob opaque to the client.

So I like "token-based pagination".

This is highly aggravating and confusing when hipsters try to coopt terms that had a defined meaning for decades. The ones that grate me are "retina display", "real time", "x-nanometer node".

Thank you, now I don't need to write this comment

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