I am seeing that more and more new APIs use page tokens to let the user move between the pages of results containing a lot of items. However from an API designer point of view I'm not clear on what the benefits of using a token are when compared to letting the user specify how many items he wants to skip.
So here are my questions :
- What are the benefits of using a page token over a start index ?
- Roughly, in high-level terms, how does the typical page token implementation keeps track of pages ? Caching all the results would be rather inefficient. I'm guessing that some sort of hash could be used, but I'm not sure what would be hashed to reconstruct the results.
Thank you