Hello Jim,
Am 26.09.2023 um 15:03 schrieb Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Simple reason for pagination. Performance.
Not all of us are blessed with faster download speed so if there is a large number of items to download pagination will usually get the user what they want in the first page or two.
Uhm.
What kind of table are we talking about? An embedded picture per row? Then I'd understand.
For a pure textual HTML table, even my unworldly 12000 rows of IBM documents collection index page equals to just 2.8MB of HTML data. Now, this is an extreme example. As much extreme as e. G. vmware vcenter or some web shops to default to 20 rows each page. I assert, it's not performance for the end user leading to the decision to implement that. Especially considering vmware being meant to be used locally, over LAN.
At least eBay allows to expand this to 200 rows, which is most often enough to get all search results on one page, and thus an acceptable number. Vmware is braindead enough to only allow expansion max 200 rows on certain spots, (VM list) but not for e. g. some lists of data stores when configuring VMs. I *always* need to click on the "next page" to get the data stores I'm required to use.
Even then, for a bigger VM farm, 200 entries is laughable.
This being said to make you understand why I'm highly appalled against the concept of arbitrary pagination. And I'm even more appalled against people thinking, "hey, everybody else does this, so let's do it, too!". No personal accusation intended. This kind of thinking brought us ubiquitous modern web design with lots of white space on a page, no more decent grouping elements to ease the eye, and much more scrolling around because all that white space wasting still relevant screen estate.
And if the user finds what he wants in a page or two, why not make pagination large enough so it's always ending up on the first page? Why stop thinking here and ask yourself: Is the search function maybe not optimal when it returns much more rows than the user perceives as relevant? Google is a good example: I *rarely* needed to click on "next page" in Google results for many years, when they still had a "next page" function.
I doubt that lack of download speed is a thing in 2023. At least not with carefully designed web pages and search functions.
If everything else fails to be a convincing reason, then please implement pagination being configurable by the user (who much too often has to endure crappy interfaces), and always include a "no limit" setting for pagination.
Thanks for listening to my rant for better user experience. ;-)
I too wrestle with the download counts (particularly on IBM sites) but almost always there is a download all key. Now it’s the best of all worlds.
Sorry, I don't understand. What do you mean?
:wq! PoC
midrange.com
