Question

I’ve got a page in a CMS i’m working with where a product is displayed along with a table of attributes. In some cases, the table has so many rows that the amount of HTML being loaded is causing the browser to crash. Without being too comfortable yet about digging into the back end and using AJAX and pagination for the table, is there a way I can cut down on the amount of HTML being loaded at the one time on the client side? Would jquery table/pagination plugins help with this or is the only answer to use server side pagination? Thanks!

Answer 1

It might be informative to describe what CMS you are using. A cms is quit generic.
I don’t think there is a way to solve the problem you face without digging deeper into the backend.
If you load all the data to paginate it on the client side using JQuery or some kind of plugin. Then you might have solved to issue of browsability of your displayed data but all of the data is still loaded!
Unless you can find a plugin or write some code yourself to communicate with the backend asking for only pieces (in your case pages) of the data, you can solve the issue of browsability and not all the data is loaded at once.

Or you could let the backend (server side) do the pagination for you.

It all depends on your setup, which you didn’t describe very well.