Oh, infinite scrolling pages with links at the footer, like Privacy policy and About, which you never are able to click. I always wonder who thought that was a good idea.

Fuck no it isn't. Infinite scrolling has no valid use case.

It's only valid use case, is to keep the sheep glued to their phones. In that aspect it's totally succeeded.

I use Reddit Enhancement Suite, and one of the features it adds is autoloading the next page when I get to the bottom of the current one. It's really nice.

i think it might be handy if you want a web game rather than a document.

Please give me paged results instead of infinite scroll.

I agree. Paged results can be used instead. However, what might be good is a new kind of HTTP range request, and possibly some way to programmatically delimit each result in a HTML document.

That's already in HTTP/1.1, the Range header comes with units. The standard defined "bytes", but a Web developer can also use more granular units, for example "items". (See <http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters#range-units>...) I've seen that in the wild a couple of times in the context of JSON based request/response pairs.

I was aware that the Range header has units; I did not know of any units other than "bytes", though.

Speaking as someone who browses the web with JavaScript disabled:

To the sort of person who installs NoScript breaking infinite scrolling is one of several advantages. Infinite scrolling is a great tell that there is an infinite amount of content with no marginal value.

You know "infinite scroll" isn't literally infinite right? It's just a next page button triggered at a scroll offset.

Of course it is not literally infinite, but when viewing a stream like LinkedIn for example, it may as well be infinite in practice.

It's nowhere near as good as a next page button.

I didn’t say it is (I think it’s conditional on the type of interface and data involved)

Visit any infinite scrolling site and click on the link associated with an item in the list. Hit the back button.

Q: Where are you in the list now?

A: It is impossible to know because no two sites behave the same way. You will not be anywhere near the item you clicked on in the majority of cases.

I've run into too many sites and apps with poorly implemented infinite scrolling from a usability and resource consumption viewpoint.

Infinite scrolling is an appalling travesty of a UI pattern.

don't need infinite scrolling if the end of the page has a huge button that says "more"

No - this is still infinite scrolling