Pageless
Another prime example of AJAX is shown here. Essentially this page advocates the removal of the “page” metaphor, similar to a book. Every website uses this metaphor – when the displayed content comes to an end, the reader is directed to a “Next” link to view more content. The authors of this webpage feel that this approach is the wrong one to take.
Hence they advocate a more revolutionary approach – depending on how far the user has read, the page will display different amounts of content. For example, if a user runs a search that returns 100 results, say, then the first 15 results will be displayed. As the reader advances to the bottom of the pages, the next few results (16-30) are displayed, so that the user will not have to click anything.
While this approach is certainly fresh and interesting, I can think of many ways that it might not be feasible. For one, it takes some getting use to. The finite nature of web pages is a strong draw to some (can you imagine reading 1000+ pages of web results? Breaking it up into chunks makes it more manageable.), so this approach might not work for some. Secondly, it may (I’m not really sure about this) break web compatibility. Does it degrade gracefully on non-CSS compliant browsers? Will it display properly on text-only browsers such as elinks?
Still, I can’t deny that it is an interesting piece of work. If nothing else, it is a useful exercise in AJAX coding.
