I got it into my head that pagination can use ajax calls so I can update the relevant portion of the page without reloading the entire thing
'.pagination a:click': function() { new Ajax.Request(this.href, { asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method:'get'}); return false; }
a little change in my controller and voila. except I then realized I'd just opened up a whole can of worms with ajax, url, browser history. doing some research, I found the solutions are rather complicated, browser dependent, and not completely satisfactory. e.g.,
http://ajaxpatterns.org/Unique_URLs#Solution
does rails/rjs help us out here with some clever abstraction/library methods for handling this? thanks