And all computer desktops should look like real world desktops because.. real world?
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/frist-and-welcome/238/150
As @mikeTheLiar said, "look at this monstrosity". Hey, it looks like a real physical desktop, just like the one we have in front of us. That's good.. right?
Books are printed on pages because that's amenable to the mechanical processes of creating atoms with words on them.
The point is to create something better in the world of bits than we have in the world of atoms.
Do you enjoy reading heavily paginated articles on the web? Because all I read about web article pagination is mostly complaints:
Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.
Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. The practice has become so ubiquitous that it’s numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the Web has always been, and how it should be.
People barely scroll, so you think that forcing them to find and click a tiny "next page" button is the right solution to get more people to actually listen to the whole conversation? How is adding more arbitrary barriers to reading a good idea?
Or should conversations just be all talking and no listening? Does that make sense?
Ars Technica posted an article about gun control with this sentence in it:
If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first.
Guess how many commenters included the word bananas in their comment? Guess which comment was the first to include the word?
Reading conversations should be easy, as easy as possible, just scroll to the bottom and we'll load more. Like Jay Leno and Doritos: eat all you want, we'll make more.
The design guideline is this: remove barriers from things you want people to do. We want people to read and listen as much as possible before talking. Therefore, we remove the next page button as it is a barrier to reading.