Paginator - danator

Paginator's precomputer past

One of the things that came to us, to the Internet from the precomputer world, is a paginator. Despite the fact that the Paginator initially played (and continues to play), albeit an important, but only a service role, he had long been a standard method of organizing long lists. Paginator, as such, is also used in the real world - for paginating various books and documents. As a rule, it is not remembered when reading - the pages are simply turned over, regardless of the number of the current page. The numbers are used only for organizing links (“on page 55 on the top 10 line is written ...”) for their content - they are remembered instead of using bookmarks, or allow you to indicate the content of a specific page in a book.

The current state of the paginator

On the Internet, things are about 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, the link can usually be given to a specific entry, and not to a page with several dozen of such entries. And secondly, the numbering of pages on the Internet often begins not from the beginning, but from the end. Remember - on the first page shows the latest entries, recent comments. There are sites on which the numbering is organized on the contrary - the last entries are on the last pages. It’s not 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, I first saw such a solution in Habré and at first it confused me very much.

There are also various unique solutions. In particular, a calendar is sometimes used to organize movement through the contents. But I have not yet met a single site where navigation through the calendar would be the main method of navigating through the pages.
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Thoughts about the paginator that came to my head

Not so long ago, I thought about how it would be possible to make a paginator easier and more understandable for ordinary users.

What did I end up with?

I came to the proposal to combine a paginator with a calendar. I reflected on the application of the paginator in relation to my blog, and therefore I ask you not to interpret my fabrications comprehensively. By and large, they can be used to organize lists where content is published with a clear correlation of time. That is, these are blogs, guest books. Possibly forums. But these are not search results or store listings.

So here. As in many blogs, besides the usual paginator, a calendar is also used, which shows the number of entries per year, per month, per day. Also often references are made to specific days or months. At the same time, calendar ideas penetrate blogs so deeply that the organization of url using posting dates is considered practically standard. But at the same time, the concept of a page remains, which is used exclusively for flipping through the results of issuing, although simple keyboard shortcuts (ctrl + → and crtl + ←) would suffice for that. Such mechanisms are used on many sites, including Yandex, when displaying search results.

I also want to draw attention to such a moment that nobody cares how many records are shown on the page (of course, if they load quickly enough and you can always open the next one) . However, in scripts they often focus on the exact number of entries on a single page. Perhaps I would call it a move, but I will not be so categorical. I just want to point out that the number of records on the page should not be very large and not very small. In figures, such a statement can be expressed as ± 50% of the usual number of entries on the page will not cause any discomfort to the user.

I also think that splitting content into pages depending on the date of publication will be a much more logical option. On the first page - today's news, on the second - yesterday and so on. It is worth repeating that I speak only of such lists, where the interrelation between the filling of this list and the past tense must be traced. Under this definition, suitable blogs, forums, guest books, lists of comments. I suspect that this is more than half of all lists on the Internet - sorting by time is very popular.

Key thought notes (Sic!)

From here you can make quite an interesting conclusion - the generated pages can be different both in the number of records per page and in terms of time coverage. Nearby there may be pages containing 5 records for 2007 and 10 records for January 2008. I think this is logical and correct. I do not know, however, how this little idea will be perceived by others.

P.S

Threat For those who decide to see how it is done with me , I can immediately disappoint - there is only an experimental version. Perhaps, if the idea itself is like it - it will be finalized to a decent look. But while I only have a paginator.

ZYY While I was preparing this note, I came across a rather interesting version of the paginator - Paginator3000 . Despite the positioning of the author as a “paginator of the future”, I cannot say that this is more than a “combed paginator of the present”. At the same time, using a scrollbar is definitely worth it - it's convenient. But from the use of numbered pages, I would have refused in favor of using publication dates to break down the list of records on different pages.