How to retrieve the position of a row inside a table with garbage data in all cloumns?

hello_world(); in fact.. how to goTo next/previous row of a table without using incremental ids AND without reading the whole table? i will explain: I wanna do something like a paging toolbar blinded to a list of rows (for example, a literally view of a db table). The first difference from a normal paging system, is that i wanna show only one row per page, and luckily i know the id of that first viewed row; so, no problem until here. Im able to show the first row xD. The second difference is that i don't know the position of the first viewed row inside the whole original table, only the id of the row (maybe someone is laughing while reading 'only'). I would like to know the position of that row to allow a easy goTo next/prev method using LIMIT/OFFSET sql clauses. But, since id's aren't incremental, and since i don't know the position of that row, i cant find any way to know witch row is the next/prev. I found a few solutions and it is poorly working now, reading the whole table and thats all :o]. The front-end of the app, is not robust enough to fast-process this amount of data (javascript), so this solution is a piece of ____. I'm missing something? How to retrieve the position of a row in a given table (always ordered by ASC id) without reading more than one result per query using -only- raw id's? Thanks for your time. Trullo :o] P.S. Im using php526/mysql5051b but a generic answer is highly appreciated.