I was trying to read this article about Mozilla Firefox extensions today.
It's a good article, but an even better example of how you shouldn't split articles across web pages, even if they're long.
Go and read a bit of it now, and be thoroughly frustrated by how unusable the navigation is (don't hit >> by mistake to go to the next page like I did!), and how damned slow the whole thing is.
Whenever I see one of these stupid sites which needlessly butchers their own content, I always look for the Print Page button, just so I can read the whole thing in one go. Well, once I've cancelled the print dialog of course. To top it off, this site doesn't even have that.
Why are sites chopping up their content like this?
I have several theories:
None of these reasons is good.
If your website is too slow, rearrange the HTML so that the content appears first, and the navigation/adverts/links/crap gets shifted down to the bottom (of the HTML file, that is). Now apply CSS to move the navigation where you want it, and ensure that the central part of the page (ie. the bit people are going to read) is rendered immediately.
Of course to do this, you're going to have to get with the programme, ditch your old table-based layouts and move to modern CSS. But there are so many other good reasons for using CSS layouts that it makes sense anyway.
The slowest part of the experience is clicking from one page to another, which requires a whole load more round trips to the server. Why break the user's flow half way (or even 6 times) through the article?
Really, your users are wise to this trick now. If your articles are too long, make them shorter. The scrollbar is there for a reason, not just for scrolling, but to provide visual feedback about the length of the page. Don't subvert the scrollbar.
Yes you can. This isn't a limitation in any known form of HTML. Perhaps your content management software is limited, in which case throw it out and get some decent CMS tools (I admit, there are very few excellent CMS tools around - at Merjis we think we've got one).
So there you go. There's no really good reason for it. So it's safe for you to show your article on one page right now, and don't make me look every time for the Print Page button.