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18/10/06 Proposal For A New Tag
I’d like to make a suggestion for a new ‘HTML Tag’ called
Clicking their forward button or defined hot-key would go forward a page in history.
<next url=”next_page_url” />
</head>
Why would you want that? I’ve started reading allot of articles online recently. Who buys magazines these days anyway? And all these articles are split over a number of pages. I don’t want to break my reading up having to search for the number of the next page to click. All I want is a hot-key (like Google Reader [j / k]) that will take me there.
Where-else is this useful…
- Result sets on a search engine.
- Next article, when you’ve reached the end of a page.
- Browsers could pre-cache the ‘next’ page for quicker browsing.
How handy would that be?
Tags: General
12 Comments
hi Robin –
such a thing already exists — it’s the “rel” tag. see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.3
19/10/06 Rowan
There is one already! The link tag:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#idx-link-2
You can do [link rel="next" href="..."]
I don’t know any browsers that change their interface though. They mostly use it for prefetching. Messing around with the semantics of the Back/Foward buttons should not be taken lightly. For example, what should happen if
* I’m on the 2nd page of a 3 page sequence
* I click a link to go to another site, not in the sequence
* I click back
* I click foward
Should I go to the next page in the sequence, or to the other site I was just at?
19/10/06 Rowan
You want browser buttons, I’ll give you browser buttons :) see the Link Widgets extension for firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2933/
Not a bad idea in itself.
But (theres always a but) It would have to be very carefully to avoid explotation and what would happen when a user goes from a site that has a ‘next’ page and then types in another website URL, then clicks back again… now, what is the forward button going to do, take to user to the ‘next’ page or the other website? It would be confusing for dopey users… 70% of the online world that is. Maybe a different button could be implemented in the browser, a special NEXT PAGE button rather than using the forward button… just my 2c.
Good idea, but bad, bad implementation, and the tag in question already exists and is called the LINK tag, specifically . Firefox can already do precaching on this and in older versions of Mozilla, there was even a toolbar that displayed any such links. Opera still supports it completely.
You is bad, because, as Peter explained, it overloads the the forward button in nasty, horrible ways. However, the idea itself (rather than its proposed implementation) is fine, even if TimBL and co thought of it first.
Rowan - That is a great plug-in. It does a great job of recognising the page without coding it in. Now it just needs to be linked to a hotkey…. like the [j/k] for Google Products unless in a form field.
Topper- ok. forget the Forward button idea. Any button will do! Infact - forget a button. Buttons require moving the mouse to them and in that case you may aswell click the [next page] button on the site. A hot key is perfect as above.
Keith - didn’t know of the link tag. I’ve no experience in scripting language inmplementation structures, so take your point as valid.
Thanks all!
I’d be very surprised if you really didn’t know about the LINK tag. After all, it’s used for doing things like linking to stylesheets, feeds, &c.
Aside from the next and previous pages, you can also link to tables of contents, indexes, glossaries, versions in other langauges, and so on. A toolbar would be useful for all these with keystrokes for the next and previous page.
ahh that one. yeh.. i know that one! lol
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