Infinite Scrolling
Infinite Scrolling
[Megan stands at a desk, reading a book, touching it very gingerly. Cueball is standing behind her. Cueball: Why are you turning the pages like that? Megan: If I touch the wrong thing, I'll lose my place and have to start over.
[Caption below the panel:] If books worked like infinite-scrolling webpages
Infinite scrolling is a technique in web design where a large data set is displayed as a seemingly infinite list, but in reality only the visible part of the list (and the surrounding data) is rendered. This is done to work around memory limitations of old browsers and mobile devices or to save on data transfer size.
The problem with this technique is that if you navigate from this page to a different page and go back, the location of the scrolled data set is often lost and the top of the data set is displayed again. Also it is usually not possible to point a URL directly to a certain section of the infinite list, a practice known as deep linking . For these reasons, many prefer pagination , the method traditionally used in books, over infinite scrolling.
In this comic Megan is handling the book gingerly as if it were a device with a touchscreen where the book is displayed as an infinite scrolling text. Touching a link would navigate away from the list and the current reading position would be lost.
In the title text it is an ironic suggestion that the "back" button is now useless. The back-button is supposed to give you this functionality but due to the failure to implement continuous scrolling sites and deep-linking correctly they are typically useless when the user is reading infinite-scrolling data (or worse, flat-out counterproductive, giving you the wrong page). Alternatively, this might be a joke on the stereotype that web users are unable to make the most helpful or intelligent decisions, similarly to 1454: Done , 1974: Conversational Dynamics , and 2051: Bad Opinions .
[Megan stands at a desk, reading a book, touching it very gingerly. Cueball is standing behind her. Cueball: Why are you turning the pages like that? Megan: If I touch the wrong thing, I'll lose my place and have to start over.
[Caption below the panel:] If books worked like infinite-scrolling webpages