Offlate, several websites, notably Quartz and its Indian counterpart Scroll have been using the Infinite Scroll format. What is your take on it? Personally, I feel it is good, but only works well if you have loads of content. I've been told that it is a pain for SEO purposes, but it can be pre-rendered for Search Engines. Any thoughts on this?
I hate it -- passionately -- because it chews on memory like candy, is harder to search, makes it harder to link others to content, and just plain reeks of the "pageloads are evil" paranoia propagated by ignorant fools who couldn't write semantic minimalistic markup to save a puppy's life! It's exactly the type of scripttard for nothing nonsense that pisses all over usability and is typically done because the code is so poorly written and ineptly developed, they have to pull stunts like that to avoid a pageload as they waste hundreds of k of markup on doing tens of k's job! See all the halfwit mouth-breathers who see nothign wrong with what 90% of turdpress templates vomit up and have the unmitigated gall to call HTML -- or worse the outright idiotic non-semantic bloated bull that frameworks like bootcrap or YUI encourage people to use in utter and complete ignorance of what HTML is, what CSS is, or why either of them even exists! On a LOT of sites, it leaves me screaming at the display "For ***** SAKE what's wrong with pagination?!?" -- particularly if I'm looking for something specific. At BEST, it's a goofy gimmick; at worst it's pissing on accessibility and usability from so on-high you'd think the Almighty just got back from a kegger.
I'm generally not a fan although it does seem to be a more modern trend. They make things unnecessarily difficult when you're trying to find something specific, although maybe the types of websites that use infinite scrolling have other targets/purposes. Or maybe I'm just old
The short answer. It is just about the stupidest way in the world to do a web page. It returns zero (no wait < 0) benefit for a lot of work and wasted resources. Net result is a load of manure that has issues with accessibility, usability, SEO, and maintainability. I used to think that Geocities was the worst possible example of stupidity, but this approach is at least as moronic as the worst of GC.
Yes but if they had jquery, bootstrap, and all the other crap that is available today they would have used it to build splash pages that took a day and a half to load. A lot of the junk I see today would fit right in with the common GC approaches; infact, some of them look like updated GC pages.