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Comment by peterjmag | Hacker News Reader

I cringed when I saw infinite scrolling as the first feature they're highlighting on the landing page. I expected it to completely break back/forward navigation (a la returning to your home page feed on Facebook or Twitter). However, I played around with the demo a bit, and I was pleased to see that they've somehow solved that problem. I'm still not a huge fan of infinite scrolling in general, but this looks like a significant improvement.

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Thanks. I'll probably write up a blog post of how it's done eventually but the short version is we use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll down a topic stream, so you have a unique URL to go back to and share.

There is a little more intelligence as links within a topic just replace the state, but links to other topics push the state.

Also infinite scrolling downwards is easy to implement. Upwards is a huge headache.

Please write it up!

There are non-terrible ways of doing infinite scrolling, they just take a lot of work. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741

I haven't tried it, but infinity scrolling is horrible, as is pagination. There is no limit on the size of webpages, so don't put artificial limits on them.

Database can't handle the load? Put caching in.

Pagination as in when a forum displays its topics in numbered pages? I've never had a problem with that.

Pagination as in whenever it is used.

Ever tried to read a long article online? I have seen them split over 15 pages.

And yes, I always click the print/view on one page button.

And it is even more insulting with comments -- I am not going to click/scroll just to see ten more comments.

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