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Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

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Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#11

Post by mbrubeck »

_delirium wrote: post #2

An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g. by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

AutoPager for Firefox already does this, but I think it needs to use heuristics or hard-coded rules for most sites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/

And Firefox will pre-fetch links with rel="next" so that they load faster: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#13

Post by patrickyeon »

mithaler wrote: post #7
_delirium wrote: post #2

An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g. by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

The pentadactyl add-on (used to be vimperator) for FF does this, ]] for next, [[ for previous. I believe it first checks for 'rel=' links, then links that contain 'prev', 'back', 'Hopefully this catches on, and we can use this instead of every site trying to have its own keyboard shortcuts (j/k or left/right or z/x/c, that last one being especially stupid for non-qwerty typists).

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#14

Post by WillyF »

Google continues to leverage its power to provide a better experience for their users as they click on links they find through search. This is one example, and First Click Free is another.

The flip side of this is that publishers are now offering an inferior experience to users who navigate directly to their sites. If I type in NYTimes.com and start browsing through articles because I'm a big fan of The New York Times, I'm treated worse (I have to deal with an article limit and pagination) than if I stumble on their articles through Google. Google is giving more and more value to brands, while creating an atmosphere that rewards people who have no brand loyalty (except to Google).

Google has been strong-arming publishers for a long time. Generally it has made the Internet a better place, but it still makes me nervous (especially as a publisher). Google seems to be pushing to eliminate more and more tactics that are profitable for publishers (and generally bad for users). I doubt that Google will kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but you have to think that publishers are going to start to push back if it goes much further.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#15

Post by ugh »

mbrubeck wrote: post #11
_delirium wrote: post #2

An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g. by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

AutoPager for Firefox already does this, but I think it needs to use heuristics or hard-coded rules for most sites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/ And Firefox will pre-fetch links with rel="next" so that they load faster: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ

Safari (which leverages Readability for its Reader functionality) also does that. It seems to try and detect links at the end of an article that look like pagination links which sometimes leads to interesting failures. Being able to do that more reliable for more websites would definitely be a plus.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#16

Post by technomancy »

patrickyeon wrote: post #13
mithaler wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

The pentadactyl add-on (used to be vimperator) for FF does this, ]] for next, [[ for previous. I believe it first checks for 'rel=' links, then links that contain 'prev', 'back', ' Hopefully this catches on, and we can use this instead of every site trying to have its own keyboard shortcuts (j/k or left/right or z/x/c, that last one being especially stupid for non-qwerty typists).

I use this in Conkeror, and it drives me batty when I stumble on comics that don't provide pagination links. This kind of stuff should be Web 101.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#17

Post by bergie »

mithaler wrote: post #7
_delirium wrote: post #2

An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g. by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

I'd love to be able to swipe left or right to navigate pages on a tablet.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#18

Post by cobralibre »

I haven't thought about rel="next" and rel="prev" since the middle of the last decade, but I recall that the blogging community used these attributes in semantically different way. Instead of marking parts of a single unit of content, rel="next" and rel="prev" were used to mark the next document in a chronological series.

IMO, this latter usage is consistent with both HTML 4 and HTML5 semantics. I suppose Google's approach can be read as consistent with the specs, too, but either usage takes a different interpretation of "a document" and the relationships in a series of documents.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sequential-link-t...

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#19

Post by [deleted] »

pornel wrote: post #10
mithaler wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

Opera has that already — Forward button becomes "Fast Forward" and if you use Spacebar to scroll to the bottom, it will automatically follow "next" link. Ironically, HTML5 recently dropped bunch of link relationships because of lack of browser and search engine support.

[deleted]

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#20

Post by loevborg »

pornel wrote: post #10
mithaler wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

Opera has that already — Forward button becomes "Fast Forward" and if you use Spacebar to scroll to the bottom, it will automatically follow "next" link. Ironically, HTML5 recently dropped bunch of link relationships because of lack of browser and search engine support.

This is one of Opera's most useful features. Back when Opera was the best browser, I used this all the time. I used the forward mouse gesture to jump to the next page of results. The fact that both gestures and "fast forward" are not included in Chrome drives me nuts.

I know that there are extensions in Chrome for gestures, but they don't seem to work all too well on slower computers running Linux. On a box with 1GB of memory, the extension "mouse strokes" used too much RAM pretty quickly. I wish Chrome had built-in support for mouse gestures. Some of us still use a mouse as their pointing device!

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