It lacks affordance.
It means my tools don't work as expected (ie, the scroll button doesn't work)
It means I can't use long screens to view two parts of the same article at once.
One good thing about it is that URLs work well to link to specific sections.
However, I've been doing some testing of different reading ideas and I've found that I like a long vertical scroll, broken up into screen-high pages, even better. Finish a page? just scroll down to the next one.
For some reason it feels more like reading a book to me, and I think it's because on a physical book, I don't turn the page when I finish a page, I get my finger under the page early and start to prepare to turn it quickly, slightly revealing the next page and providing continuous reading as quickly as possible.
With the paged-vertical scroll, I find that as I near the end of one page, I'll start scrolling early and put that bottom of that page at the top of the screen so I can jump to the next page without a break.
This seems to work better than just one long vertical scroll (without pages), and I think it's because I subconsciously note the page breaks and they give me a moment to pause per unit of text.
most PDF readers work the same way.
I'm personally finding that on mobile, it works better for me than the skeumorphic turn-pages-like-a-book metaphor.
1. The desire to limit the size of HTTP responses. 2. The lack of the ability to notify a browser that you're done loading/rendering async content.
Aside from page-flip-metaphor apps like the one posted here, it doesn't seem like a desirable UX pattern.
Have there been recent (or not so recent) developments in either of those problem areas?
I'm not sure it is possible to talk about this in general terms - the specific use-case needs to be considered. In the case of Wikipedia, I think that the page size of a typical Wikipedia page isn't problematic.
I suspect it's actually pretty rare that the HTTP response size for text documents is big enough to be a problem. 1M of text is pretty large in terms of text, and most pages would have more than that in embedded images.