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by MBCook 4362 days ago
So not only are we ignoring how scrolling is supposed to work and implementing our own version, we're now 'fixing' the browser by layering full 'screen' iframes on top of the content?

Lovely. All this to solve what issue, exactly? I've yet to see a site where infinite scrolling was an improvement. Hard to navigate, stutter, and losing my place (I know) are not improvements.

This isn't getting cleaner, this is getting more complicated by piling on 'fixes' to the 'bugs'. That should be a sign.
2 comments
craigspaeth 4362 days ago
That's a fair point. I think there are arguments for both pagination and infinite scroll and one is not necessarily better than the other. Jeff Atwood has an interesting post on this http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-end-of-pagination/ where I think he makes a good point about "[...] once you have thousands of items to paginate, who the heck is visiting page 964 of 3810?". On the other hand infinite scroll has a slew of quirks with it too, so there are arguments both ways.
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hamburglar 4362 days ago
The argument that nobody is visiting page 964 of 3810 on a paginated UI seems somewhat compelling at first until you realize that nobody is scrolling down to the 964th screenful out of 3810 either, and even if they do, your infinite scrolling implementation made it more painful than necessary and is probably making them scared of clicking anything lest the whole thing get reset to 0 all over again.
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lugg 4362 days ago
Infinite scrolling is a solution required by pages that take years to load all their assets and ads where clicking the fiddly often impossible to find next link or the even hard page number: 2

The thought pattern of developers could probably be summarized as: that scroll, so infinite, much scroll.

A better solution would be to use infinite scroll technique to navigate and load pages using the history apis, correctly and changing the page URL. You end up with a seamless pageless experience with all the benefits of traditional paging but no longer have that "nightmare" usability issue of next buttons and links. I've seen this done only once, I can't quite recall but it was on something like tumblr or medium.

As for the articles approach, I have no fucking idea, a modal iframe? Seriously?

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