My first network connection device was a 2400 baud modem. Practically speaking, that would allow me to sustain downloads at a rate of less than 250 bytes per second. This was relatively fast at the time; I'd been using my buddy's 1200 baud modem to connect to local BBSs before that modem-netting birthday.
To put this into perspective, the Yahoo! homepage, all considered, is somewhere around 470kB. On my early-90s era modem, it would have taken a little over 30 minutes (half of one hour) to download (in perfect conditions, without protocol overhead (good ol' zmodem), and if my mom didn't happen to pick up the phone during transfer).
For the past few years, I've had a 10 megabit connection (downstream) into my home/office. Under perfect conditions, I can pull the entire Y! homepage, and all attached media in less than half of one second.
In the early 90s, the Y! homepage was obviously much smaller—all pages were smaller—but even with a smaller footprint, many pages took a long time to load. I remember browsing with many windows open (browsers didn't have tabs back then... in fact, we barely had browsers (-: ), loading up a dozen or so pages before alt-tabbing back to the first one I'd queued up a few minutes before (on my 14.4kbps modem, by this time), to see if it had finally finished loading.
To overcome low connection speeds, lack of resources on the client side, and other factors such as connection latency that lead to slow page page loads, web pioneers came up with a model for allowing content to be delived in reasonable sized chunks that is still in use today: pagination. Long lists of (say "100") pieces of data ("search results") were separated into smaller pages (of "10"), including widgets to allow skipping to the next, previous and often any page in the set.
Well... mostly still in use today.
Technologies have helped us hack around the idea of separating growing amount of data into pages. Ajax, for example, allows the dynamic loading of the next set of results without forcing a page reload (often poorly... try bookmarking the result of many of these dynamic populations. Even Mobile Mail on the iPhone/iPod Touch allows something like this.
It seems to me, though, that web interface designers are stuck in this rut of showing end users a mere 10, 20 or even 100 items at a time. My 10Mb connection can handle a lot more traffic than you're sending; your server had better be able to deliver it (and usually, it can); my browser is allowed to allocate much more RAM; and I even like to think that I've microevolved the ability to parse much more data that I could a few years ago.
So, I ask you, fellow web professionals: is pagination still necessary? I obviously don't think so, but I'm not a User Experience guy, I'm a user (and also the guy who has to make the UX happen, and make sure your server can deliver the results mentioned above). Tell me what you think.
