Unpaginate pagination microformated web pages

By Johan Sundström — Last update Dec 4, 2008 — Installed 1,652 times. Daily Installs: 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 4, 0, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 6, 2, 3, 0, 0, 1, 0
Script Summary:
Unpaginates pages marked-up with the pagination microformat. (microformat consumer)

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This script will unpaginate any web pages augmented by the pagination microformat, into what traditionally (if somewhat incorrectly) has been called "endless" Google, Flickr, and similar, pages. In other words, a hack that loads the next page into the present one when you scroll within about half a screenful of the end, so you don't have to lose the pageful you have to load the next pageful -- it just gets inlined for you, instead.

By itself, this script will do nothing at all, because it only contains the code that implements this unpagination; tailoring it to other sites is up to other, much, much smaller custom scripts anyone can write -- or indeed site authors may augment their site templates with, for the benefit of their visitors running this hack, should they want to.

So, what does this microformat look like? It consists of:

  • A <link rel="next"> tag with a href attribute pointing to the next page.
  • Three <meta name="..." content="xpath expression"> tags:
    name="items-xpath"
    An XPath expression that matches all items to slice out of each page.
    name="pagination-container" (optional)
    For pages that have a pagination list that you want to update when loading each new subpage into the present, this XPath expression locates that in the page.
    name="next" (optional on sites where all pages are served from the same domain)
    An XPath expression that resolves to the next link of the present page.

For examples of microformat producers for this script, see the source for the Google search results, Flickr photo comments and OkCupid journals (the latter works with presently released pre-0.8 Greasemonkey installations) handlers.

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