Paginator - Datanator

Paginator pre-computer past

One of the things that came to us, on the Internet from the pre-computer world, is a paginator. Despite the fact that the paginator initially performed (and continues to fulfill), albeit an important, but only a service role, he has long become the standard method of organizing long lists. The paginator, as such, is used in the real world - for page numbering of various books and documents. As a rule, they don’t remember him when reading - the pages simply turn over regardless of the number of the current page. The numbers are used only for organizing links ("on page 55 in the top 10 line ...") to their content - they are remembered instead of using bookmarks, or they allow you to indicate the content of a specific page in the book.

The current state of the paginator

On the Internet, things are roughly the same. The main task of the paginator is to give access to the content displayed on other pages. But links to it do not give for several reasons. First, a link can usually be given to a specific entry, rather than to a page with several dozen such entries. And secondly, pagination on the Internet often starts not from the beginning, but from the end. Remember - the last page, the last comments are shown on the first page. There are sites where the numbering is organized the other way around - the last entries appear on the last pages. It is unusual for an unprepared user to start reading something from the last page. It is also worth considering that at the moment there are not so many such sites. Personally, for the first time I saw such a solution on the hub and at first it confused me very much.

There are also various unique solutions. In particular, a calendar is sometimes used to organize content navigation. But I have not met a single site where calendar navigation would be the main method of navigating through pages.

Thoughts about the paginator that came to my mind

Not so long ago, I thought about how to make a paginator more convenient and understandable for ordinary users.

What did I end up with?

I came to the proposal to combine the paginator with the calendar. I thought about using the paginator in relation to my blog, and therefore I ask you not to interpret my thoughts comprehensively. By and large, they can be used to organize lists where content is published with an explicit correlation from time to time. That is, these are blogs, guest books. Maybe forums. But these are not search results or store lists.

So here. Since in many blogs, in addition to the usual paginator, a calendar is also used that shows the number of entries per year, per month, per day. Links to specific days or months are also often provided. At the same time, calendar ideas penetrate blogs so deeply that the organization of url using posting dates is considered almost a standard. But at the same time, the concept of the page remains, which is used exclusively for turning over the results of the output, although for this simple keyboard shortcuts (ctrl + → and crtl + ←) would be enough. Such mechanisms are used on many sites, including Yandex, when issuing search results.

I also want to draw attention to such a point that no one cares how many entries are shown on the page(Naturally, if they load quickly enough and you can always open the next one) . However, scripts often focus on the exact number of entries on one page. Perhaps I would call it bad manners, but I will not be so categorical. I just want to point out that the number of entries on the page should not be very large and not very small. In numbers, such a statement can be expressed as ± 50% of the usual number of entries on the page will not cause any discomfort for the user.

I also think that a much more logical option would be to split the content into pages depending on the date of its publication. On the first page is today's news, on the second - yesterday and so on. It is worth repeating that I am talking only about such lists, where the relationship between the contents of this list and the past tense must be traced. This definition applies to blogs, forums, guest books, and comment sheets. I suspect that this is more than half of all lists on the Internet - time sorting is very popular.

Key Thought Notes (Sic!)

From this we can make a rather interesting conclusion - the generated pages can be different both in the number of records on the page and in time coverage. Nearby there may be pages containing 5 entries for 2007 and 10 entries for January 2008. I think this is logical and correct. I don’t know, however, how this idea will be perceived by others.

P.S

Threat For those who decided to see how this is done with me , I can immediately disappoint - there is only an experimental version. Perhaps if the idea itself is liked, it will be finalized to a decent appearance. But for now, I only have a paginator.

PSY While I was preparing this note, I came across a rather interesting version of the paginator - Paginator3000 . Despite the author positioning him as a “paginator of the future”, I can’t say that this is more than a “combed paginator of the present”. At the same time, it’s definitely worth using a scrollbar - it’s convenient. But here I would refuse to use numbered pages in favor of using publication dates to break down the list of entries into different pages.