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Sil van Diepen
Sil van Diepen

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The curious case of the infinite page with a footer

Some websites have the brilliant way of displaying articles or images in an infinite way. Which means when you scroll to the bottom, the page automatically loads the next set of articles.

At the moment when you are on the bottom, you see footer for a flash, but you won't be able to click anywhere, because the next set of articles is loaded already.

So why put a footer there in the first place? It's just annoying.

Dev.to is one of these examples, go to the homepage and experience it yourself.

Top comments (5)

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darksmile92 profile image
Robin Kretzschmar • Edited

I understand your point and it makes sense. In my opinion this is good practice of CI and steady design because you have the footer on every page and in the unlikely event of loading the last set of articles and reaching the end, this would signalize the end of articles and comes back to the point of consistent design again.

So totally fine in my opinion.

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silvandiepen profile image
Sil van Diepen

I don't think we are going to agree on this.

So you so its fine to have unreachable elements which you do see sometimes? I don't think thats good practice in any way. The footer should be taken away and only a loader should be shown.

Consistency through pages is important, but having everything reachable which you can see is even more important.

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darksmile92 profile image
Robin Kretzschmar

I understand your point. I personally don't care much about the footer on DEV but I can relate to your view on this.

Let's see what the discussion brings and if it will be changed 😊

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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

Hi Sil, there has been a debate for quite a while about DEV's footer, I personally side with those who propose removing it from the pages with the infinite scrolling, especially because those links are available on a sidebar.

There's an issue opened, I would add your opinion there as well, see github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...

Hope this helps!

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silvandiepen profile image
Sil van Diepen

Yes this helps! Didn't know that was actually a thing already. Just came by it and was really wondering why somebody would make a design choice like this. But yeah, theres aquite some design choices here which I'm wondering about :)

Thanks!