I've always kind of wondered why certain sites do this. It gets to be a little irritating having to click through 6 or eight pages reading an article. And when there is a link to a full-page version, its always buried at the bottom of the article. On the other hand, some sites never do this, a la ESPN. Is it an advertising thing? Or is there some other rationale I'm not comprehending?

I'm guessing it's the ads. If they can make you look at six pages they can report that many more impressions.

The places that aren't hurting for money tend to just give you the content directly without any gimmicks. It's the ones who need the revenue that generally use stunts like divide the article after 250 words, or show ads with "continued after the break".

Another reason is that, it IS easier to read an article split into multiple pages. Same reason why we went from using scrolls to books - easier to keep track of and easier to reference (say if you link an article to someone you can just link the page and be like "look at paragraph 5, rather than "look at paragraph 247").

But yea, ADs are also a big (if not bigger) reason, for sure.

While I dont mind the splitting, what grinds my gears is the absurd amount if shit on each page. There's the nav bar! And the sub-nav bar! and the sub-sub nav bar! And the "latest news" box! and the "top 10 articles" box! And the "top 10 articles in current category" box! and the "top 10 active users box!" and the "Relevant articles" box! and another nav-bar! And a Facebook/Twitter/Digg link! And and and...

Jesus, just let me read your goddamn article.

While I dont mind the splitting, what grinds my gears is the absurd amount if shit on each page. There's the nav bar! And the sub-nav bar! and the sub-sub nav bar! And the "latest news" box! and the "top 10 articles" box! And the "top 10 articles in current category" box! and the "top 10 active users box!" and the "Relevant articles" box! and another nav-bar! And a Facebook/Twitter/Digg link! And and and...

You could give Readability a try.

Another reason is that, it IS easier to read an article split into multiple pages. Same reason why we went from using scrolls to books - easier to keep track of and easier to reference (say if you link an article to someone you can just link the page and be like "look at paragraph 5, rather than "look at paragraph 247").

Actually, no. Reading an article that is split into multiple pages is more cumbersome because of the time delay for getting to the next page or previous page. Section headings are used for keeping track of where you are in an article. The comparison with books is silly, since they operate under totally different (physical) constraints.

You may be confusing this with the observation that texts that are too wide are hard to read because of the difficulties associated with the eyes jumping to the next line of text. There are no similar considerations about splitting a text into pages.

http://records.viu.c...ies/kafka-e.htm

Read this in one sitting. Then tell me you're glad it wasn't split into pages.


EDIT: And no, adding section headers would NOT make it easier to read. Narrowing the columns and increasing the font size would only make the already ridiculously long page even longer.

http://records.viu.c...ies/kafka-e.htm

Read this in one sitting. Then tell me you're glad it wasn't split into pages.

EDIT: And no, adding section headers would NOT make it easier to read. Narrowing the columns and increasing the font size would only make the already ridiculously long page even longer.

I did, and I'm glad it wasn't split into pages. Admittedly I got bored and skipped through much of the middle (Kafka is hardly my cup of tea). I read it without my browser maximised, so the columns were narrower (easier to read), but the paragraphs are short enough that it's easy not to get lost in whatever's visible in your window. Of course it gets longer when you make it narrower - that's irrelevant - you're still reading the same number of words after all.

Still, your example is something that was written for a book (i.e. not formatted for the web in the first place). It's not really surprising that adding section headers is inappropriate in this instance, since there're no chapters, but I don't see that splitting something into entirely separate pages (with separate href addresses?) is in any way better - it's purely a side-effect of book form, which turned out to be the most practical physical medium (more compact, less winding). Your only issue seems to be that there's no easy way to reference, in which case paragraph numbers added automatically during upload would be fine as a work around. For other formats (e.g. news articles) section headers work fine, or the articles are short enough that that isn't a problem in the first place (see the BBC for a fairly well laid out news site - one page articles (admittedly not very long), no ads, subheadings).


Another problem with splitting things into pages (an absolutely heinous offence with programming manuals / references) is that Ctrl-f is no longer usable.