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I always have to scroll down to go the next page if have more than one page of questions. Could the page navigation also be added at the top of the page in Stack Overflow?

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Instead of annoying mere regular scrolling, you can also use ctrl+end or a mouse gesture (browser permitting, of course; e.g. mine is currently hold-right-click+wheel-down for bottom of page). –  Gnome May 11 '10 at 12:23
Maybe one of our Greasemonkey wizards can do something about this... –  Jon Seigel May 11 '10 at 12:42
If you use Opera, all previous and next links contain the "rel=prev" or "rel=next", so a simple gesture or shortcut goes to the next page. I'm sure Jeff would recommend you to use Opera as well. –  Gnoupi May 11 '10 at 12:55

1 Answer 1

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I'm against this.

A user interface should be optimized for the standard behavior. While it's sometimes debatable what the standard behavior actually is, in this case it's clear. Scroll through the list, and if you haven't found what you're looking for or just want to keep reading, continue on the second page. So it makes sense to have the paging controls on the bottom.

Adding them on top is only useful in the rare situation when you know that what you're looking for is not on this page without actually reading it. And adding an additional control for a 1-percent-situation is a no, because for the other 99%, it's just noise.

And there's always the End key.

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Ok, I also accept this.But this is feasible for beginners.But what about for advanced users.They have more pages. –  ahmed May 11 '10 at 11:42
Also, multipage questions are rare, it's usually only for the "best thing" or "must have" cases. It's really rare that you have to go farther than the first page for an actual solution to the question. –  Gnoupi May 11 '10 at 12:49
Or use the keyboard shortcuts, PN. @ahmed –  slhck Feb 24 '12 at 10:12
Here's another use (the one I use): When I come back to the Mathematics site, I scroll up until the most recent "newest question" I recognize, and then scroll up towards "now", in a sense, "catching up to the questions in chronological order". I end up having to scroll down to the bottom after reading the page to move to the more recent page. You may very well call me weird, but that's another behavior in which button at the top would be useful. So the one you describe isn ot necessarily "the only" situation in which they would be useful. (-; –  Arturo Magidin May 22 '12 at 16:44

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