Ted Clayton

Pagination was the solution to the frustrations of infinite scroll, around 2,000 years ago. “Scrolls” were obnoxious to handle, and a nightmare to cite or reference. Rich owners of libraries built special racks so they could just leave scrolls open to their last reading-spot. Some unrolled the whole thing – permanently – and climbed up & down ladders to read.

If you seriously have a lot of stuff to display, then seriously you need pagination.

The invention of the paginated Codex (ie, paged book) enabled citation & reference as we know it, and led directly to an explosion of research & information-dissemination … heretofore ‘locked away’ in scrolls. WordPress calls its tech-library, “Codex”, in cogent homage to the value of structuring facts & knowledge … and repeatable, predictable access to it.

Infinite scroll can be fun in certain ways & situations for users, and of course developers never met a novelty they didn’t become infatuated with. Generally though, using pages is the imperfect solution that delivers the most, at the least cost. Think Democracy, and human rights: less than ideal, high-maintenance, and often abused … but as good as it gets, and where would we be without it?

With infinite scroll, think “frames” and “fixed content blocks”. Handy tech in specific contexts – but deprecated by over-enthusiastic or outright inappropriate deployment.

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