API pagination design
This is trumpeted around and actually put into production every once in a while.<p>The reason opaque pagination is an antipattern is because you can’t optimistically fetch resources.<p>So your customer, the person that paying you for your product, needs to wait for some number of <i>synchronous</i> reads.<p>With non-opaque offsets these can be done in parallel. If the typical request requires 4 pages, these can be done 4 at a time and of it is less than 4 pages those can be discarded.<p>This is a clever hack that ends up being user hostile in actual practice. Remember APIs are designed for the benefit of the consumer vs the benefit of the maintainers.