When I am on mobile net, especially if the connection isn't all that great the infinite pagination can be frustrating on image searches and the like, especially if I want to load something else concurrently too. In my opinion the best solution isn't doing away with pagination, but rather it should be supported by the browser. If I could visit a new site and I would just have to hit a UI button or a hotkey instead of looking for the (usually small) page controls, that would be awesome. Another addition is, that if the scheme would be supported by the browser, than you could start preloading the content of the other pages (hopefully only the textual) once the current is finished so you could search those pages too with the browser's search feature. I don't know, this sounds really utopistic and I think it would require W3C implementing a new standard. Maybe in the next decade...

I used to work on a project, where I had 3 layers like you said, namely XML, XSL-T and CSS. Unfortunately XSL-T isn't very good for the exact purpose it is created for, because it's a functional language that is supposed to walk through data - even lacking at that. It has no iterations, variables, reliable complex conditional statements or even cross-platform mathematical tools. It was interesting to use it, but in the end it was such a mess to work with it, that the next time I wanted to present data from XML on HTML+CSS I just ended up making a code to code compiler for it in Python...