A clear and present page.
My hypertextual sensibilities were honed in simpler times. Back then, a page
was a page was a page, and each page had it's own distinctive URL. Of course that's
still true, but not quite as definitively as it once was. Today many pages seem
to be generated out of the blue, residing in some sort of database limbo, and
coming into actual existence, only when we call them up.
But that's a different
issue than the one that led to this link. Here I'm more concerned with the navigation
difficulty that arises when links to a particular page can be found on more than
one page. In a situation such as that, how does our browser know how to bring
us back to where we came from? The logical solution is the Back button,
and it's available to us precisely for that purpose. But site designers seem to
want to be self-enclosed - they want a link on the page, not within the
browser. Which is what the javascript:history.back()
link offers us. No matter which page we arrived from, when we click on it, we're
brought back to that page, and not to a page predetermined by somebody else's
logic. And so it is, in numerous course sites that I've built, that I've found
that I need that sort of link in order to permit students to get back to whichever
of the various possibilities was the actual page that linked them to the present
page upon which they find themselves. That's certainly legitimate. What I don't
understand in situations such as these, however, is why that javascript link gets
embedded under the word Back or something similar. That simple word suggests
that whoever prepared the page isn't aware of how unclear that command can seem.
I prefer to be more longwinded, but less ambiguous, and I'll use something like:
to the page from whence you came.
Of
course this particular page is accessible (via a link) from only one page, so
I could have used a bit of sleight of hand and coded the link in the previous
paragraph to specifically bring us to the page we arrived from, but that would
be missing the pont.
Go to: Well, not always, or
Go to: No
need to click for an example, or
Go to: Dr.
Hierarchy and Mr. Associative