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Wednesday, April 09, 2008

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Now and then (i.e. "all the time") I read blogs or other web content that has a handy navigation tool at the bottom of some pages, like the broken version illustrated above. But there's some maddening inconsistency about the way these things are used. Sometimes older content is referred to by "Previous" (because after all, it was written earlier, and therefore previous in time) and other times by "Next" (because in many cases one starts reading at the present, and therefore earlier posts have now become later in the reading sequence). Coupled with this is the problem of browser-based navigation which uses forward or back (sensibly mapped onto "Next" and "Previous" respectively) regardless of the sort of link one may have used to get there.

Sometimes you get sensible labels like "Older" or "Newer", or numbered entries (a system that doesn't work all that well for regularly updated push-down sorts of content, I suppose), but a lot of the time you don't. It's especially messy when the individual doing the browsing has many pages open at once, likes to navigate using multiple methods, and is totally scatterbrained.

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Wednesday, April 09, 2008 4:38:27 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)