I was just reformatting my /links page and thinking about sub-pages and what makes more sense. So… thoughts?
- I wanna scroll! Give me long pages with section or summary tags!
- I wanna click! Long pages make it harder to follow!
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I like having a lot of content on one page, rather than going backwards and forwards between pages to get to different sections of similar content.
That being said, I feel like there’s definitely a limit to how much you want on one page. For example, my beer reviews page has ~460kB of HTML. 
As a result, it takes a while to load (like, way too long), even on my speedy internet connection, so I’ve had to start thinking about ways to paginate or break up the page into multiple pages. (shoutout to @fLaMEd for helping me work through this!)
I don’t know what that limit is—depends on the type of content and how much of it there is, I suppose—but assuming everything is still loading quickly, I prefer having access to all the related content on one page. The Resources List for the Personal Web page here on Discourse is a good example of this, imo.
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I like a well-structured long page, with headers and sub-headers and maybe a ToC at the top. Gives me a better idea of how much content there actually is in this specific section of your site as opposed to lots of clicking and choose-your-own-adventure style site navigation.
my preference is for long pages in most cases, and that preference is especially strong for resources like a links page. i often use Ctrl+F to find what i’m looking for, and it’s easier if i only have to search once.
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“Page views” used to be an important metric for ad sales so sites would structure articles to get more clicks on more pages. I don’t see the need for it now.
Maybe if it’s a links page it makes sense to structure it like a directory.
I like this too. Links to subheadings at the top of the page, or filters with a little javascript to display this or that.
Agree with @hex . A long page that’s nicely formatted and contains a table of contents at the top is my preferred approach to solve this. Not a fan of many small pages at all.
But, like @Ravenous mentioned — there’s definitely a point where long becomes too long. In that case, I think a well structured “section front page” with an overview of all the different pages makes a lot of sense.
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I’m a big fan of well structured pages but also small pages are helpful especially for folk using mobile devices for internet access. At least in the US now, many providers will offer “unlimited” data connections but after a few gigabytes of transfer they slow way down to 128kbps speeds.
Also worth remembering that while many people have gigabit or faster connections, others in more rural areas do not.
Browser dev tools in Firefox and others will let you simulate the speed of a slower internet connection.
Here for example, simulating a GPRS connection for the GitHub homepage leaves me waiting for minutes for the page to load at all.
Another consideration is something I think about a lot. If your page fails to load a resource, does your website still work? Not requiring JavaScript to load can be a huge consideration here, but it can be worth testing your site nevertheless. I’ve seen pages that loaded but due to a CSS file not loading correctly or fully, the page was unusable as a result.
A single page can be very useful for archiving, however.
The GNU Emacs manual (I did the cover art a number of years ago, and used Emacs a lot previously) is a good example of both approaches.
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https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html (one page per section in the book)
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https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/emacs.html (a 500+ page printed book on a single page)
Another thing I like to test is a using the page with a screen reader. Good navigation and well specified links can help, but a long page is still a long page.
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For what it’s worth, you don’t need Javascript for that. You can use Sainthood’s CSS Tabs or @solaria’s CSS Filters, which are the basis for my template Bibliodex.
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id make one page focused on one topic, no matter the length. like all links on the same page. i have my lore dumps, and one story gets one page, sometimes its really long bc i put a lot of details into it, sometimes its short bc its not that fleshed out.
Having a balance is best. My rule of thumb is that a section that doesn’t even fill a screenful of text probably doesn’t deserve its own page, but it depends. Conversely, long pages make it easier to see everything at a glance, add new text and reorganize it, but can become tiring after a while. The trick is learning to notice when you need to split them up.
I think whether you use long pages or short pages is totally contextual: you could have something short and punchy and then create trees of pages to help with easy navigation, but long pages are super useful for finding things (much more so than links and links). My own practice is to have each page as its own piece of content. In the pipeline, I’ll have my “Me” page which is a quick summary, and then more in-depth pages about a variety of different topics. For something like links, I try to keep it all on one page, unless the size becomes unwieldy, then I’ll break pages down into categories.
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I’ve been enjoying curating a table of contents as I go. The way this looks on a current project is I will say “ctrl+f for…”.
The result is, you can ctrl+f for `ctrl+f` and bounce down the page to gloss the contents. The directive might be: embed the documentation into the process itself.
Happy longforming!
I second this, for me this is the way to go as well