Comments on: Eliminate paging results by using JavaScript (ala DZone)

By: Paul Irish

Paul Irish — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:04:19 +0000

I have a jquery implementation on my blog: Aurgasm. I’m also in the final stages of releasing a Wordpress plugin for Infinite Scroll that captures all this functionality.
I think I’ll add in some permalink functionality now, since there is definite demand for it.

btw- this comment captcha is infuriating.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:47:02 +0000

Google use something similar in their Feed Reader. Makes scrolling through 100s of Feed-Items a charm.

So the technique surely has its applications. Maybe not so for ordered data sets as Kevin pointed out.

I too would like to see the jquery implementation of this.

By: jaisen

jaisen — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:14:31 +0000

@Anton, also a good point. Ajax/dHTML in general is not very web crawler friendly. At the moment anyways.

If SEO is important then I think it’s still doable using this method. You would have to make sure that the link structure on the site (aside from or in addition to) a page that includes Ajax/dHTML ensures that search engines can reach all parts of the site.

By: Anton

Anton — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:10:59 +0000

Also this makes entries not accessible by web crawlers.

By: jaisen

jaisen — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:48:14 +0000

@bhaarat
I was originally going to do this using YUI. It’s on my list of things to learn but I knew I could whip it up real quick with prototype.js. If you have a working example using jQuery then link it here…I’d like to see it.

By: bhaarat

bhaarat — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:18:46 +0000

I implemented this using jQuery…never got time to blog it though :)

but the points that kevin has mentioned are very good. One way to avoid this could be to add some sort of sticky link that would take you back to the previously loaded subset.

As for sending ‘link’ to your friend..well this example just has images..but if your ’s (or whatever you’d use) had html links then used could just send those links.

but a good example nonetheless…

By: jaisen

jaisen — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:55:18 +0000

That’s a good point. I do still think that there are good applications for it though. Think about Digg’s “upcoming” section. Links get added so frequently that the pages don’t really help bookmark any specific entry. This doesn’t replace paging…but provides an alternative.

Something additional to consider is that users are familiar with paged results. I like this solution because it feels pretty seamless…but there’s value in interfaces which users are familiar with.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:00:53 +0000

I think part of the point of paging is so the user doesn’t have an unsurmountable number of records to view at one time. With this method you will continue to increase the number of records on the page until it becomes too much for the user. At that point it would be hard for the user to find a specific record in the set - especially if they leave your page and then want to come back and find a record. And what happens when I find something good that’s number 250 in the list, how do I share that with a friend? With paging I can send a link to the page, or at least tell them which page it’s on. Seems cool but not practical.