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.