Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by Symmetry » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 5:32 PM UTC

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.

Yup, on Chrome it seems that Alt-N goes to the next page and Alt-P goes to the previous one. I really wish more web sites supported it, though.

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

#22

Post by access_denied » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 5:42 PM UTC

jws wrote: post #9

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.

I've been hoping for this for many years. Without requiring new buttons or keys, an interesting strategy would be to make the "history forward" gesture/key/button follow the "next" link. Assuming sane use of next and previous this works well for viewers that start at the beginning. What to do for the "back" function is ambiguous when previous doesn't match to history, as in a case where a viewer lePt Ito the middle o…

Can't you do a Greasemonkey for that? Maybe guessing at the site structure via knowing what different types of CMS tend to do and learning from browsing history?

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

#23

Post by there » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 6:06 PM UTC

i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it, because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically go to the next/previous pages that use these tags.

what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the resource usage.

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

#24

Post by ineedtosleep » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 6:27 PM UTC

there wrote: post #23

i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it, because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically go to the next/previous pages that use these tags. what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the…

What was your percentage of Opera users, if you don't mind me asking? If it's only a very small percentage, was the increase in resource usage really that significant?

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

#25

Post by guldi » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 6:28 PM UTC

Is there a good reason to paginate anything these days? The fact that publishers make people click on a 12pt link to read the next "page", and thus view more ads, is pretty insane.

If you aren't using infinite scrolling, chances are you're doing it wrong.

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

#26

Post by there » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 6:31 PM UTC

ineedtosleep wrote: post #24

there wrote: post #23

i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it, because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically go to the next/previous pages that use these tags. what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the…

What was your percentage of Opera users, if you don't mind me asking? If it's only a very small percentage, was the increase in resource usage really that significant?

it was a small percentage, but the pages being requested were accessing external resources that i had to pay for on a per-view basis. paying for those views without actually showing anything to the user was wasteful.

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

#27

Post by Qerub » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 6:38 PM UTC

Another plus with adding rel="next" and rel="prev" is that you can easily add keyboard navigation to your pages with a script like this: http://vemod.net/rel-keyboard-navigation

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

#28

Post by pornel » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 8:26 PM UTC

there wrote: post #23

i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it, because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically go to the next/previous pages that use these tags. what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the…

I use both Opera and rel=next on my websites and never noticed it prefetching anything (but I wish Opera supported at least rel=prefetch…).

There used to be proxies (Google Web Accelerator http://webaccelerator.google.com/support.html#basics2) that aggresively prefetched pages, but modern browsers don't prefetch unless you explicitly ask with rel=prefetch (or Chrome's own version of thereof).

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

#29

Post by infinity » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 8:28 PM UTC

cobralibre wrote: post #18

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 a…

I agree with you, the HTML 4.01 specification says that "next" refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. A sequence of documents ordered chronologically would be a linear sequence, like the sequence of blog articles published on a certain blog. The individual articles could be regarded as "stand alone" documents and do not require the other articles in the sequence for some "completeness".

The Google article talks mainly about paginated content and mentions that it comes in different forms. The examples given in the article suggest that here we have a sequence of pages where we should or could have only one document, like in the example of the forum thread: it may consist of many pages, ordered in a linear fashion, but individual pages of the thread might be somehow incomplete. The whole thread is the document. I think that this interpretation is different from the interpretation of next/prev indicating a chronologically ordered sequence.

The article mentions also "The first page":

>>The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup."The first page" means that there is only one. Could we have more than one first page as entry point into the sequence? Like a story with different possible beginnings converging to a common end?

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

#30

Post by ars » Thu, Sep 15, 2011, 9:12 PM UTC

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.

They did: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87428 it got removed at some point, but there used to be a toolbar with various link elements, prev, next, alternate version, etc.