

Is pagination still necessary? - henning
http://seancoates.com/is-pagination-still-necessary

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

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

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

~~~
m_eiman
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!

------
alecco
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.)

------
litewulf
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...

------
psyklic
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.

~~~
mct
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.

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

------
Jem
It must be nice to have a decent internet connection.

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

~~~
smoody
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...](http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/load-content-while-scrolling-
with-jquery)

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.

------
bprater
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.

------
tocomment
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.

