[wp-hackers] Alternate paging URLs

[Mike Schinkel]

On Mar 3, 2010, at 4:14 PM, scribu wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:54 PM, Dan Phiffer <dan at phiffer.org> wrote:
>> On Mar 3, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Dave Viner wrote:
>>> After all, when a user is going from page to page, they usually want to
>> see the
>>> latest information, not necessarily the identical information to what was
>>> shown before.
>> This is one assumption my alternative is trying to draw attention to. It is
>> true that *usually* pagination is used this way, but what happens if I
>> bookmark one of these views for later, or if I create a short URL to page
>> 40? I'm trying to link to the particular content on those pages, not the
>> position from the newest content. The particular content on these pages will
>> change over time and my links will rot.
> That sounds naive. It's like trying to link to a portion of the twitter
> stream. Of course you're going to get link rot.
> 
> A better idea would be to link to a group of posts posted on a certain date:
> 
> http://example.com/2009/11/20

While I agree the latter makes more sense, I wouldn't say the former is naive.   Sadly, too many people just don't get URLs as evidenced by the ReadWriteWeb/Facebook Login fiasco:

http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-read-urls/

It is really incumbent on the site designer to create URLs that won't rot when bookmarked, as much as they reasonable can. In this case the site designer is the core WordPress team, not individual site designers.

Twitter fixed this (somewhat) by loading pages on the same URL via AJAX.  They could have used AJAX to also annotate the URL with a hash indicating the start and end range and then had the hash load the expected values via AJAX. Even better would be to change the URL path when the new values are loaded but I can't remember for sure if that's possible (I know changing the hast is possible because I've used that technique for a video gallery before.). If they had done these things their links would not rot.

Of course for people who want to bookmark "current list", this isn't idea so I would lean towards annotating the URL if the user goes to page 2, etc.. Too bad browsers don't give AJAX a hook for when someone cuts or copies a URL from the browser bar.

-Mike