Is pagination still necessary? | Hacker News Reader

Is pagination still necessary?

seancoates.com

10 pointshenning12 comments

I suppose that for many sites this simple equation is the main reason for pagination:

pagination == more pageviews == more ads displayed == more money

Exactly. In most cases, pagination isn't about performance at all, just page views.

Luckily most of the really annoying sites have a "printer friendly" version of their articles - and printer friendly is m_eiman friendly. And Instapaper friendly too, yay!

Pagination is not just necessary but the only way for many scenarios in production. A typical example is fetching sorted and transformed search results from a large catalog. Without pagination you get to terabytes. Not just that I/O would take ages and cpu usage skyrocket, it would make the system un-cacheable too. This is very common for large web services. Of course, it all depends on the details.

On the other hand, many content websites often do pointless pagination (perhaps to increase page views for ads.)

Can you imagine searching for "John" on Facebook without pagination?

I think of pagination as an incentive to make search better, because people rarely click to page two...

I read an article recently saying that Google tested more results per page (i.e. less pagination), and that the increased search/loading time actually made users have a less positive experience.

Speaking of pagination with Google, has anyone else noticed lately that Google seems to be forgetting the pagination value you can configure via the "Preferences" link? For a while I thought that perhaps Firefox was losing the cookie, but the same browser hasn't had any trouble keeping me logged into my Google account, even when the search preferences are lost.

google's search cookie seems to be separate from the account cookie. Same forgetting happens with "safe" search preferences.

It must be nice to have a decent internet connection.

Without pagination, there are many websites I wouldn't be able to read.

Eliminating explicit pagination does mean one has to load everything at once. Google Reader is a good example of this. There are libraries out there that allow a sort-of load-on-demand of content. Here is one example using jQuery: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/load-content-while-scrollin...

The bigger problem, in my mind, is keeping track of where things are. In that case, explicit chunking has an advantage. It's easy to remember things like "it was on page 2" (especially helpful when being on the phone with someone who is co-browsing with you). But when there's continuos scrolling, that becomes difficult.

Pagination exists because it's relatively straightforward to program on the server-side.

To do client-side pagination, you need a hacker who is willing to take all the rendering out of his preferred language and using Javascript and Ajax instead.

And then you end up horribly breaking the back button.

When you're designing a page you don't really know how many results there could be so it makes sense to build in paging.

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