Pagination

In reference to books produced without a computer, pagination can mean the consecutive page numbering to indicate the proper order of the pages, which was rarely found in documents pre-dating 1500, and only became common practice c. 1550, when it replaced foliation, which numbered only the front sides of folios.

Word processing, desktop publishing, and digital typesetting are technologies built on the idea of print as the intended final output medium, although nowadays it is understood that plenty of the content produced through these pathways will be viewed onscreen as electronic pages by most users rather than being printed on paper.

Today, most pagination is performed by machines, although humans often override particular decisions (e.g. by inserting a hard page break).

This is a software file and recording format term in contrast to electronic paper, a hardware display technology.

More accurately, such documents are named by the markup language that makes them displayable via a web browser, e.g. "HTML page".

[2] Server-side pagination is appropriate for large data sets providing faster initial page load, accessibility for those not running Javascript, and complex view business logic, while client-side pagination allows navigating between pages without delay from a server request.

[5] In comparison to bottomless scrolling, pagination allows skipping pages and can be implemented with permanent links (as done with the offset URL parameter in the MediaWiki wiki engine), whereas bottomless scrolling does not require clicking or tapping if loaded automatically.

Pagination is an approach used to limit and display only a part of the total data of a query in the database.

This usually involves a markup language (such as XML, HTML, or SGML) that tags the content semantically and machine-readably, which allows downstream technologies (such as XSLT, XSL, or CSS) to output them into whatever presentation is desired.