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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing an obvious single page link, or do they really want you to pay not to have to click through 25 pages?

> or do they really want you to pay not to have to click through 25 pages?

You can get Ars Premier, buy the ebook or use some sort of stitching reader.

Not that I have a problem clicking through 25 pages when each page holds 1000 words and is a self-contained section or a pair of sections. Siracusa pays close attention to pagination in order to pace the article, in my experience of his reviews the page breaks are actually welcome as they give natural "yield" points for doing something else before coming back

edit: in fact, Siracusa notes (on his blog):

> I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page.

> [...]

> Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many tiny pages. That’s not the case. I choose how to paginate the article. I like to break it up by topic, if possible, which means that the “pages” vary widely in length. This year, Ars Technica actually asked me to merge several pages together to reduce the total number of pages (and I did).

So not only did he decide the pagination based on his desires regardless of advertisement money, ars actually asked him to paginate less.

Apparently someone needs to do a 25-page review of the W3C HTML spec and link to the section on the Anchor tag for him.

You mean the thing he used in his table of contents and in every fucking section title of his review?

You should avoid blaming him for your own misreadings.

"I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page."

Tell me why 'I can remember I was reading the section "A Cloud In Three Parts"' doesn't work?

There is a reason that sites that actually understand the medium put a mouseover on Section Titles and anchors so that the link is discoverable. If you don't put a link anchor next to it's respective title you really have no option but to think "Gee, pages are better."

The same reason it's easier to remember that something in a book was 3 pages ago rather than 14 paragraphs... or even sections. It's cognitively useful to have a physical measure for distance rather than a more abstract one; clicking a link on the web is (metaphorically) understood as a physical act of moving. Scrolling is physical, too, but it's more fluid while paging is sort of "integral".

Give it another ten years and the concept of knowing you were on page 5 will be the same as knowing you were listening to the b-side of a vinyl record. It'll be nice for nostalgia, but will cease to be a reference point.

That might be the case but it's irrelevant to the point I was making, that physical metaphors are cognitively useful to provide an alternative structure/index to experiences/information. Your example is a good one because we have lost this particular physical metaphor in the move towards CDs and more so regarding MP3s. But the web has its own set of metaphors, and web browsing as a journey is a pretty powerful and entrenched one.

His point about long scrolling web pages isn't actually valid. The way to do it is to have a table of contents, and fragment identifiers for each section.

> His point about long scrolling web pages isn't actually valid.

His point is perfectly valid, it's about mnemonics.

> The way to do it is to have a table of contents, and fragment identifiers for each section.

Considering his reviews have both table of contents and fragment identifiers, I'm going to go ahead and assert he knows about those.

That does not help remember where you are in the article.

I can remember I'm on section 13 just as easily as I can remember that i'm on page 13.

Good on ya mate, I'm sure you're really proud of yourself. How does that pertain to Siracusa remembering pages better?

How is remembering "I was on page 8" easier than "I was on section 8?"

Your browser history doesn't update itself when you scroll to a new section in a long page.

I would expect Siracusa to have read books in the past. Possibly more than a handful. Books tend to be indexed by page, teaching readers to remember their position through pages when not using book marks for whatever reason (or when said book mark falls out)

This would lead Siracusa to have an easier time remembering his position through page number due to his personal experience. Note how that's exactly how he worded it, that he preferred page breaks because he can remember it better? At which point "MatthewPhillips" asserted Siracusa was plainly and simply wrong?

What does help you remember where you are is putting a "link to this section" anchor or something similar next to each logical section. Many sites implement this with a mouseover.

FWIW, Siracusa works very hard on the pagination of these so it makes sense and provides a better experience than the un-paginated version, it's not just auto-split page view inflation on which your knee-jerk reaction has been conditioned.

I agree that Ars deserves the page views, but if you really want a single page, use Readability:

http://www.readability.com/articles/6ynwkoyx

Pictures seem to be stripped out, though.

I saved it in Instapaper, and read it there. It grabbed all 25 pages.

Pocket worked well for me too.

AutoPager (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mmgagnmbebdebebbcl...) for Chrome enables you to just scroll through the entire page, works great for me at least.

Why yes, you are missing an obvious single page link. It's the big blue button in the Safari URL bar, labeled "Reader". :-)

Indeed and if you click the printer icon you can save it as a pdf

Jesus. I dont know how many words are in the OP but I'm sure it's an astonishing number. And all made available for free. Are you really zipping through the piece that fast that a five second intermission is too much to tolerate for a free massive article?

Yeah, it's one thing to arbitrarily break up an article to get page views. It's another thing to break up a huge long page to make it more accessible.

> Jesus. I dont know how many words are in the OP

About 25000

edit: more precisely, from Siracusa's blog: 25935 words, 167 images, 206 external links

There is no single page link for non-subscribers.

They often sell PDFs and ebooks for their major articles.

I find it sad that the state of content is such that we consider PDFs to be the premium content.

Any version without ads is the premium version. Often the first thing I look for in an article is the "print" link, even though I have no intention of ever printing it - for some reason sites make the print version nicer to read.

Yes, they do. Do you have a problem with that? Why?

Besides, the page breaks are not arbitrary (like on so many other websites), they actually make sense. They are basically chapters. I do not think there is anything wrong with those kinds of page breaks. (Though your personal preference may be different and if it is you are free to pay, suffer through the page breaks or not read the review. It's up to you.)

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