Stop Pagination Now

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/website_pagination_stories_should_load_into_a_single_page_every_time_.html

by zonotope • 14 years ago

189 90 14 years ago

slate.com

mfincham2• 14 years ago

Much bigger sin: Boing Boing style "endlessly load more content with Javascript" nonsense.

If you're browsing on an (arguably flawed in its implementation) iOS device where page state gets unexpectedly dumped all the time (e.g, tab switching, browser crashes, "multitasking" switches out to an IM client), this style of "pagination" is utterly pants. I end up having to manually edit the URL to advance through content like Boing Boing and Tumblr just to be sure that when Safari or Chrome inevitably next dump my page state I won't have to start from the very top again.

krogsgard3• 14 years ago

Yeah, paginating articles and paginating archives are two totally different things. Paginating articles (as the article linked describes) is not a good user experience. But not paginating archives, otherwise known as endless scrolling, in my opinion, is not good.

cheald• 14 years ago

Endless scrolling can work if you use it in conjunction with replaceState to make sure that the URL reflects that the user is looking at. Outside of that, though, definitely annoying.

machrider• 14 years ago

Yeah, I can't stand infinite scroll pages. It becomes impossible to pass a link to someone to a specific section of entries. It generally breaks the back button -- when I click a link and then go back to an infinite scroll page, it has dropped all the dynamic content and has to reload it, and then I have to scroll back to where I was (which may have involved several minutes of scrolling and loading content).

Perhaps it's irrational, but it also frustrates me that such pages have no bottom. I think people got used to a model of a page where it has a top and a bottom, and now it's a bit weird to interact with. One of my favorite examples is Facebook's implementation, which leaves several useful navigation links in the page footer. These links taunt you as you tried to scroll to reach them, only to have more news content appear in your view and push the footer off screen again. (I think they've since duplicated those footer links in other locations so you can reach them, but it doesn't change the fact that this broken UI model presents options and then sucks them away before you can click on them.)

darkstalker• 14 years ago

Infinite scroll pages are harder to read with a pointing device withouth a scroll wheel, because the scroll bar jumps randomly when reaching the bottom.

mfincham2• 14 years ago

Boing Boing at least have fixed this. Even though the page still scrolls forever, at the bottom of each "segment" the "Older Entries" link no longer disappears when the additional content loads, allowing for optional pagination :)

di• 14 years ago

But of course, even this article itself is paginated.

Perhaps ironically, but still.

krogsgard3• 14 years ago

If you read even a little bit of the article, you'll see it's Slate's policy to do so. But even then, if you click the next page, he just completes the joke he made in the article.

fletchowns• 14 years ago

Poor guy couldn't even get through the first sentence before he felt the urge to try to impress us all with his keen observation.

tnuc• 14 years ago

Article on single page.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/...

ynniv• 14 years ago

... but you'll miss the joke on page 2

bockris• 14 years ago

Which reinforces his point for me. I didn't visit the 2nd page due to apathy.

djloche2• 14 years ago

>"Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page."

As much as I hate it and would love to think that pagination is just a publication pipedream, it's not.

Some online publications have spent (and will spend if they're interested in making $) significant time and $ A/B testing various levels of pagination such that their sites are optimized so that there are just fewer pages than their readership is unwilling to tolerate.

The end result is that their sites are optimized to make the most amount of money. If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it.

Of course, there are copycats that don't do the testing, don't optimize for their niche of readers, and are probably losing both money and readers because of it.

We can argue about publications adopting different business models, but that's a different story. Advertisers pay a premium for engaged, targeted niche audiences that match their products/services. That's the reality of the online advertising market.

0r3jq4a0j4• 14 years ago

If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it.

I can assure you that this is absolutely not the case. If you look at Plotz's comment, it's exactly what most editors will say:

Pages that run too long can irritate readers. We run stories of 2,000, 4,000, even 6,000 words, and to run that much text down a single page can daunt and depress a reader. So pagination can make pages seem more welcoming, more chewable.

They really believe this.

It's important to realize that despite all the buzz about A/B testing in the industry, editors pretty universally believe they don't need to validate their opinions through testing. Why not? Because though school and their careers they've been told that their opinions matter, and, in fact, that's all their job really is: voicing opinions and making judgements, because they believe they have special insight into what readers want.

Look no further than Poltz, a writer and editor with no software design or development experience, who somehow believes he's qualified to make that statement.

joshuarrrr4• 14 years ago

I'll ignore your general disdain for writers and editors, and point out that not all readers want the same thing. I've pushed for non-paginated articles at my publication, but I admit that I'm not always happy with the result, and we do hear reader complaints about not being able to orient themselves in an article like this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/the-cosmolog...

(hopefully a wider content-well after an upcoming redesign will help)

I'm curious to hear what people think of a hybrid pagination system, like that currently used by Computing Now magazine. I like that it gives the user a sense of the article length without interrupting the flow of reading. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/careers/cont...

mcpie• 14 years ago

Pagination can in fact increase reading time. Most readers never finish an article. In fact, most readers drop out after the second paragraph. Not because the articles are shit, but because people have a short attention span.

By adding a 'next page' button, you create an incentive to keep reading. By spiking the curiosity of the reader to find out what's behind the bend, they linger instead of leaving.

krogsgard3• 14 years ago

Pageviews only matter in, obviously, a pageview driven ad model. In other instances, like the author mentions with Buzzfeed, pure pageviews aren't the entire goal. If publishers can get advertisers more interested in unique visitors and (especially) length of time on the site, then pageviews could be less important, and terrible practices like Mashable-esque page-reload sliders and six page articles can start to go away.

djloche2• 14 years ago

It's less pageviews and more reader engagement. You want to provide your salespeople solid evidence to convince the advertisers to pay the premium rate.

While perhaps the last part of the deal is measured in ad impressions, all the other facts and figures are important: time on site, pages per unique visitor, where the site's traffic is coming from, etc.

joshuarrrr4• 14 years ago

>there are copycats that don't do the testing, don't optimize for their niche of readers, and are probably losing both money and readers because of it.

I think this is much more common than sophisticated A/B testing.

At our publication, we were able to make the business case that the added pageviews from pagination didn't make much of an impact on the bottom-line. Because we generally run out of premium ad inventory each month anyway, most of the extra impressions were just for extremely low-revenue, Google-served remnant ads. Again, some publications thrive on volume, but it's a tough way to make money as CTR on Google ads is very low.

>If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it.

The publishing industry has not always been about maximizing profits. The weird hybrid of advertising and reader-supported has created a different mentality in the business. There are plenty of things that publishers still do- like supporting foreign correspondents- that are driven more by the editorial side of than the business side.

xymostech• 14 years ago

Does this mean that your publication, you decided not to go for pagination?

franze2• 14 years ago

the A/B test of one of my clients (in the b2c vertical) showed (for their site with their users) that people clicked more pages (which was kinda expected), and stayed longer on the website overall - with pagination (instead of endless scrolling).

duopixel• 14 years ago

Wouldn't it be possible that the time lost paginating accounts for the longer stay?

0r3jq4a0j4• 14 years ago

Paginating lists or paginating arbitrarily within long text content? There is a massive difference between the two.

ollysb2• 14 years ago

What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page? They could continue all the way to the bottom of the page. Not that I want to see this but it would be an improvement on paged articles.

malsme• 14 years ago

The comment higher up says A/B testing is used, that may be true for publishers that make use of performance ads. If you're a well known entity then you try to only accept brand ads (CPM - pay per impression/view), and those brand ads come with lots of conditions.

Advertisers want to appear near the top of the page or near the top of the content - that's why ad networks have rules about the placement of ads. Even Google (which is more performance than brand) limits the number of units that are displayed on a single page.

If your ads are at the top then there's a good chance that they will appear on the user's screen. If your ads are at the bottom and the user found the article boring then the browser was closed before seeing the ad, yet the impression was still paid for (hence, much lower rates).

dspillett• 14 years ago

> What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page?

If you are selling views, that will not wash with the advertiser as you can't reliably tell if the user has scrolled to see the lower adverts (whereas you can easily see if they clicked to see page two).

Of course even now your stats are going to over-count already (the ad may stil count as a view if there was an error on the ad server, or if the user had a proxy or plugin that blocked it (depending how that blocking is done), and so on) but that particular source of uncertainty is already accepted as an unavoidable consequence of the way the tech works, where the advertisers will see the "can't really tell if they saw the lower one" issue as a solved problem: just put the lower content and adverts on a new page.

gizzlon3• 14 years ago

Well, it's optimized to make the amount of money short term. This kind of testing doesn't tell you what the reader thinks of your site, which is kind-of the OP point.

The user might click through to all the pages, but obtain a general disdain for your site. Not saying that pagination enough to make users hate a site, but for me, personally, it doesn't exactly help.

incision• 14 years ago

Good point.

If I'm simply tolerating some aspect of a site, it means that as soon as an alternate source of or means for accessing the for the same content shows up - I'll leave and never look back.

coliveira• 14 years ago

I hate split articles too, but I believe this way of thinking is common mostly among tech-savvy people. People that don't know technology don't get annoyed by it or, if they do, just assume that this is how the technology works. Since online news are created for the vast majority of readers that are not part of our demographics, they will make more money by just splitting the articles anyway.

SjuulJanssen2• 14 years ago

Autopatchwork rocks! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeol...

mushishi• 14 years ago

I wish it worked. I actually browsed through Postgresql documentation last night, and thought this kind of a thing would be useful as it is paginated into a lot of subsections.

But the plugin didn't seem to have any effect.

edit: Within minutes it has shown to be useful on other sites. Thanks for the suggestion.

SjuulJanssen2• 14 years ago

It depends on whether the page uses rel="next"

ps2000• 14 years ago

Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading.

Pagination is better than no navigation, this is why Google Image Search is weird to navigate. The absence of proper pagination may be even the reason Google Wave has found no friends beyond its believers.

Pagination sucks when text length per page is too short and even more when 50% of the content consists of advertisements. I avoid such websites.

tripzilch• 14 years ago

> Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading.

That's why some people tend to select and highlight random bits of text while reading. It's not always because they're just fidgety :)

zalew• 14 years ago

hey, nobody beats Polish newspapers http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,6071889,Teraz_go_zarymuje.html check out the pagination

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

Good grief.

bobsy• 14 years ago

As soon as I hit a page with multiple pages I almost always lose interest and immediately leave. I can read down a single page. However when I see an article with 6 pages I am like ... ... sod that.

Its not so much the reading. Its the slow page loading which gets me down. If people did pagination right with ajax preloading the next page then I would be happy. 99% of sites do not do this. Instead their sites are slow because they have to load a bunch of third party ad's. Moving from page to page when each page takes 2-3 seconds to load kills the reading experience.

A Wired article featured on HN recently. I don't remember what it was about but it had a gallery on it. You would think in today's day and age when you click the thumbnail the main image would change. On this wired story no.. the whole page reloaded. Due to third party ad's each page load took ages. The page didn't bounce down to where the image should show. While I thought the topic was interesting the user experience was so terrible I abandoned it.

If you are going to force pagination on readers then have a single page option. Preferably at the top of the article. This way you cater for everyone.

jaxonrice• 14 years ago

Most Wired articles that contain galleries have a 'view all' link to a page that has all of the gallery images on it. The link isn't well signposted but the resulting page offers a far better reading experience.

gizzlon3• 14 years ago

Use something like readability or open all the pages in background tabs (ctrl-click) before you get to the end of page 1.

I almost never read long articles to the end, unless I've added them to readability. If I can't open them in the background so they're loaded when I want them, I usually don't bother

noselasd• 14 years ago

I always look for the "Print" button on such pages - as that shows the content on a single page.

If there's no Print option, I'm not bothering reading the thing, unless it contains info I absolutely need.

re_todd• 14 years ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking the same thing last week, wondering why I hate pagination when I used to like it. I realized it's the time it takes to load, which is probably due to the ads. I'm on a broadband cable connection, and some of the sites take 5-10 seconds to load the next page. One popular site a few days ago took 15 seconds to load the next page. Maybe I have a neighbor hogging cable bandwidth, but still the pages with 3rd party ads are noticeably worse.

sethbannon• 14 years ago

There goes Business Insider's business model.

pinchyfingers2• 14 years ago

No, they should continue paginating because most readers will just click to the second page and Slate will increase their ad impressions. I'm sure that Slate has tested this and found it to be true. If there was something different they could do to increase ad views, they'd be doing that instead.

pinchyfingers2• 14 years ago

How is this down voted? Is it not a valid comment that could lead to a meaningful discussion? Stop being tree-hugging Communists, bros.

Osiris• 14 years ago

Pagination is particularly problematic on mobile devices where connections are slow with high latency. It's much faster to load a single page than to force users to click though to more pages.

There's a few websites I run into when looking at news on my phone that have a pagination option plus a "Full article" button. I don't understand why it doesn't just load the full article. Getting to the end of the page and having to WAIT over 10 seconds to find out what the next paragraph says is frustrating.

As others point out, I rarely click past the first page when I see pagination because I hate waiting for the load files. I read a heck of a lot faster than a browser can go fetch and render a new page. I'd rather take that time to read than wait.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Pagination is perfectly fine, as long as it

1) isn't used to generate page views,

2) does not insult my capacity to read more than 50 words at a time (FOOORBES!),

3) is not used on a website that loads a lot of shit on each page

I don't use it too much, but unless the site provides anchor links to save your progress like bookmarks, it's going to be a pan to save your progress. Have fun reading that 15-page New Yorker article in one go.

Pagination sucks, when there isn't a need for it. Sometimes there is.

pre2• 14 years ago

What I don't really understand is how pagination gives more ad impressions in a way that simply adding more adverts into the text in a long page doesn't.

If the goal is more ads, why not just put more ads on longer pages?

gizzlon3• 14 years ago

Maybe they pay to have their add on the top of the page? So adds further down would pay less?? Just guessing here..

pre2• 14 years ago

I think that's probably true as it goes, even though adverts above the text are more easily ignored than adverts within the text. Funny old world.

macchina• 14 years ago

While I hate pagination, the mortal sin of click harvesting is the "slideshow." Nothing gets my blood boiling like a Top 100 list embedded in a clickthrough slideshow.

For regular articles, I use the Autopager extension for Firefox.

nlavezzo• 14 years ago

+1 for Autopager. I love it.

mcfunley• 14 years ago

> Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious...

It's not obvious. It depends on the situation. At Etsy, we experimented with infinite scroll in search and pretty much every metric we cared about got worse. But we do use it successfully in other contexts.

The thing that annoys me about this article is that it could mention A/B results in some way, but it doesn't. He's just countering some editor's opinion with his own.

itsbits• 14 years ago

Pagination is an issue only when it comes to touch devices..

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

tl; dr: I never realized people may have such different ways of using the Internet.

I am surprised by the differences in opinions here; it's kind of like there were two completely different worlds. For example, I have an exactly opposite opinion to ps2000 [0] - single page long articles are the best and I never get lost in them, because, well, every browser has a visual position indicator, also known as "scroll bar". And I love infinite scrolling of Google Images; I'd hate to have click "next page" several times.

Similarly, I completely disagree with mcpie [1] - for what I saw, it's the "next page" button where people lose their interest. One-page articles have one huge benefit: you can skim them before reading. For example, it takes me about 15 seconds to skim an article and decide whether or not commit another 10 minutes for reading it. And for that sole reason, if I can't skim an article because someone cut it into 10 pages, I usually decide it's not worth reading.

Then there are A/B tests [2] [3] which completely blow my mind, because I feel like I'm living in a completely different world, and there is this HUGE mass of people out there, people of whom I saw or know no one, who actually click on web ads, and love paginated articles, etc. and they are the majority, they are the income source of the Internet, and I have never seen a single representant of this huge group. So I'm confused. Are we really so different?

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606143

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606388

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606437

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606081

Zak• 14 years ago

90% of people surveyed didn't know it's possible to search within a web page using ctrl+f. Yes, we really are that different.

Cite: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...

dools• 14 years ago

Halfway through reading about usability sins a gigantic popup yelled at me to install their iPad app.

prawks2• 14 years ago

Not quite as bad as pagination, but probably #2 in annoyances.

electic• 14 years ago

I can't read this article. It has two pages and the title on the first page said there should be only one page for all pages on the web.

sesqu• 14 years ago

Since we're talking about pagination and article lengths, I'd like to take this opportunity to voice my #1 annoyance with unpaginated (and some paginated) articles: the comment section.

I'm perfectly able and quite willing to approximate my progress with reading an article by observing the scroll bar. However, since the advent of social, I find I can rarely trust that information, since the comment section adds an additional multiple to the page length. I often find myself going on a pgdn adventure to figure out the length of the article I've been reading for ten minutes.

Would it really be so awful if the dozen pages of commentary were collapsed behind a "show comments" or "show more comments" button? I want my progress indicator back.

pknight• 14 years ago

I'm just as fervent against pagination for the sake of page views and ads, but am I the only one that gets tired from endless scrolling? For long reads I'd rather click to the next page (provided it's preloaded with ajax).

louischatriot• 14 years ago

I found this article interesting (it really resonates with me), although a bit long. I made a tldr of it: http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506c34f3657e0ad75500014c

prawks2• 14 years ago

If a paginated article I visit doesn't have a "View All" button I typically leave. Very rarely are paginated articles so intensely interesting that I suffer through a slideshow.

dcolish• 14 years ago

Good thing this article was paginated. I didn't really bother reading it once I saw that. Hypocritical journalism isn't worth reading.

wingerlang• 14 years ago

The second page consists of only this:

> P.S. Of course I didn’t divorce my wife just because she likes multipage articles. I divorced her because she types two spaces after a period. (Not really.)

Don't know what's that about though..

DanBC• 14 years ago

Yet again I need to say that I'd happily pay a reasonable amount to avoid ads and get a better layout.

"Free" isn't really free when I'm paying for a bunch of stuff to be downloaded that I neither want nor need. And putting myself at risk from unscrupulous or incompetent ad networks.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Splitting content based on chapter, category, or topic makes sense. Splitting it based on a fixed length "page" is antiquated, and not just on the web. Ebooks and ebook readers that force explicit page lengths and page "turning" are equally as annoying. Content flows much better through scrolling instead of having hard fixed length breaks.

crazygringo2• 14 years ago

As an Internet user, I generally find pagination just as annoying as everyone else here (and paginated slide shows deserve a special ring of hell just for them).

BUT, from a web design perspective, there are actually some good reasons behind text pagination, the main three being:

1) It helps you keep your place -- you can bookmark one of the 15 pages to continue reading from later on, or forward to your friend ("check out the third paragraph" instead of "84th paragraph"). Obviously, you'd never show a 100,000-word article on one page (except for printing). At some point, pagination is necessary. Where to draw the line is obviously depends on a multitude of factors.

2) Feeling like you're "in" the site, not in no-man's land. From a web design perspective, you always want people to be able to navigate easily to other parts of the site -- you want stuff in the sidebar, never be too far away from header/footer, etc. You don't want people to be in a narrow column of text, with total white on both sides and nothing else. (Obviously users might often prefer this, like I do, hence Instapaper etc., but other users also like to be able to skip around to the rest of the site easily once they decide this particular article isn't for them, etc.) Of course, "floating" sidebars, headers, etc. can help alleviate this, but this requires the sidebars to be very small, which is not always possible.

3) "Chunking" large pieces of content is just a good thing. A huge wall of text is just no good from a usability or legibility standpoint. This, of course, is why articles are broken down into sentences, paragraphs, sections, parts, etc., so people "know where they are". Now I'll be the first to admit that paging is a particularly inelegant sledgehammer way of chunking, but when you're dealing with lots of articles of different lengths, formats, etc., it's a kind of lowest-common-denominator that is seen as better than nothing.

I don't think the current way most sites handle pagination is really that good, and it's a particularly bizarre combination to have pages that are longer than the viewing area, so you have to scroll and have to page. But given the way browsers are put together, it's a solution that basically works, given all the design constraints.

As a final note, I also think sites which don't provide any single-page or print option at all, also deserve a special place in hell. :)

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

#1 can be solved with URL hash / fragments, which link to anchors within the page. If the user has JavaScript enabled you can even automatically update the fragment as they scroll.

waterside81• 14 years ago

Scroll spy from bootstrap is a great example: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/javascript.html#scrollsp...

mattmanser• 14 years ago

This doesn't make much sense to me. I don't think it has anything to do with design at all.

If you really believed in 1, 2 & 3 then why start off saying you hate it too? And you think everyone else hates it too?

The reasons you give seem like building for the edge cases instead of the main use cases.

Also if this were the case they'd have ajaxified these articles long, long ago so it doesn't require a full page load to paginate to improve retention.

We all know why it's done, it's for more ad impressions.

lotso• 14 years ago

>If you really believed in 1, 2 & 3 then why start off saying you hate it too? And you think everyone else hates it too?

Saying s/he hates it doesn't make the other points wrong (I actually agree with them). The dislike for pagination might come from waiting for the page to load. It doesn't feel nice to see the whole page flash and wait for it to load again. It's a poor experience. If loading the next page is as quick as it is on Amazon's cloud reader, maybe people wouldn't hate pagination as much.

rabidsnail• 14 years ago

> 1) It helps you keep your place -- you can bookmark one of the 15 pages to continue reading from later on, or forward to your friend ("check out the third paragraph" instead of "84th paragraph"). Obviously, you'd never show a 100,000-word article on one page (except for printing). At some point, pagination is necessary. Where to draw the line is obviously depends on a multitude of factors.

Put permalinks next to sections headings and/or change the fragment in the url bar with javascript as the user scrolls. Links work, and no need for pagination

>2) Feeling like you're "in" the site, not in no-man's land. From a web design perspective, you always want people to be able to navigate easily to other parts of the site -- you want stuff in the sidebar, never be too far away from header/footer, etc. You don't want people to be in a narrow column of text, with total white on both sides and nothing else. (Obviously users might often prefer this, like I do, hence Instapaper etc., but other users also like to be able to skip around to the rest of the site easily once they decide this particular article isn't for them, etc.) Of course, "floating" sidebars, headers, etc. can help alleviate this, but this requires the sidebars to be very small, which is not always possible.

Use position: fixed (as you mention).Having submenus that expand on click alleviates the space constraints. You can also swap out content in your header or sidebar as the user scrolls (but please use tranitions, or you'll give everyone eyestrain).

> 3) "Chunking" large pieces of content is just a good thing. A huge wall of text is just no good from a usability or legibility standpoint. This, of course, is why articles are broken down into sentences, paragraphs, sections, parts, etc., so people "know where they are". Now I'll be the first to admit that paging is a particularly inelegant sledgehammer way of chunking, but when you're dealing with lots of articles of different lengths, formats, etc., it's a kind of lowest-common-denominator that is seen as better than nothing

What's wrong with section headings?

crazygringo2• 14 years ago

I don't disagree with any of this, just that it's all a lot of work and isn't always necessarily more desirable.

A lot of users don't understand section permalinks, fragments. Position: fixed severely constrains your design possibilities, and swapping out content just involves a lot more design and programming. And section headings are great, but getting your CMS to implement a mini-table-of-contents at the top/bottom of each page may involve a lot of programming too, and changing editorial processes, etc.

That's why I called pagination a kind of lowest-common-denominator solution that isn't great, but works. Clever programming can come up with better solutions in many cases, but they can be a much bigger pain in the butt to implement well, and there are often much more important priorities.

Taking existing websites and just getting rid of pagination isn't necessarily always an improvement.

_feda_• 14 years ago

>you want stuff in the sidebar, never be too far away from header/footer, etc.

I hate to be contrary, but no, I really don't want anything in the sidebar, at least when it comes to a piece of text that requires a certain amount of concentration to consume. That's why it's actually easier to read something from, say, the new york review of books in a physical form then it is from the website; there's just too much potential distraction, full stop, while the physical page tends to be more focused, more clean, for whatever reason.

Anyway, I think it's ESR that does the best text/article presentation on the web, for example (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-baza...)

zio99• 14 years ago

Ironic that they split the article into 2 pages, and readibility only gets the abstract, so ads got in the way as well.

hansy• 14 years ago

What about pagination with comments?

mey• 14 years ago

Did anyone else's system grind to an utter halt from ad's on that page? (Irony is not lost)

donkeylipstick• 14 years ago

Safari will automatically merge all pages into a single page, strip out the ads, and reformat the article using nice legible typography.

Is this fair to the publishers? No. But I'm glad a browser came up with a solution.

Stop Pagination Now

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