Endless pages
I’m not sure who came up with the idea first, but the crazy kids at Humanized gave me the inspiration to try this out for myself with jQuery. You can read their rationale for it, but the basic concept is that the “Next page” nav links are pretty ridiculous now considering how easy it is to dynamically load new content with ajax.
Now when you scroll down to view more content, it just loads it up automatically, giving the illusion of endless scrolling and a page of seemingly infinite length.
Also. I’ve updated autoScroll, fixing some stuff. You know how I said I’d release early and often? Turns out that doesn’t work well with me. I get lost in the code and after I finish and upload it, I completely forget to do anything else with it, such as adding a DocType to the page. Heh, yeah, not gonna do that anymore.
Quick suggestion: combining endless pages with my autoscroll script would make the page browsing experience completely seamless and effortless. Try it!
Tags: AJAX, JavaScript, jQuery
July 16th, 2008 at 8:52 am
btw, where the endless scrolling breaks is if you have a footer. that means you have to have a “frame” scrollbar thing. or an javascript-floaty footer. that has all kinds of implications from mousewheel support to users getting frustrated because they never succeed at finding the “end” of the content and thus can’t guage their progress to more specialized external api consuming issues. aka pages are no longer pages.
don’t get me wrong, i think it’s neat. but, even tho ext has been doing it for years now, there’s a reason it hasn’t seen wide adoption. there are a few specialized places where it’s handy. paging search results just is not one of them.
m3mnoch.
July 20th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
You can still have a footer if you use a div with “display:block; position:fixed; bottom:0;” which is how I hover my current menu bar up top there (only with top:0 obviously).
I understand the mousewheel issues but they’ll eventually get worked out as standards continue mature and browsers continue to adopt them. It’s not very good at the moment though, I agree.
I don’t exactly see the progress issue though. The point is to provide users with an uninterrupted stream of content. Each page/chunk is still marked of course, just as I did in my demo, so there is no navigational confusion. But there isn’t supposed to be an end — just an end to the user’s interest, at which point they simply leave.
If it really matters to you though, you can still determine the number of chunks currently in the database and display that between each chunk (eg “page 1 of 30″).