Sorry I was a little slow on the draw, but Friday's xkcd was quite funny - http://xkcd.com/1309/ and my favorite part was the alt-text. "Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web."
I laughed out loud when I read it. Then it hit me how stupid this is. Facebook, Twitter, and many popular websites have this exact failing. The Internet seems to have forgotten how browsers work. It's as if web developers don't want people to use browsers to view their pages, they want the pages to be like independent applications. Or perhaps it is laziness or other such nonsense. Whatever the case, Randall Monroe made a valid point about how this is actually a new problem. The old Internet didn't have this failing.
So set your way-back machine to the 1990s. I have an old copy of Internet For Dummies that I dusted off when I saw this comic.
Internet for Dummies, 6th Edition (c. 1999)
On page 88 this book discusses the magic of the Back button in its "Backward, ho!" Tip:
Web browsers remember that last few pages you visited, so if you click on a link and decide you're not so crazy about the new page, you can easily go back to the preceding one. To go back, click the Back button (its icon is an arrow pointing to the left, a pair of arrows in Opera) or press Alt+Left Arrow.
The book says you'll need at least 16MB of RAM to run either Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 and at least Windows 3.1 or a Mac. It discusses how without at least 32 MB of RAM the programs themselves can create problems when loading complex pages with images on them, but that the Internet speed itself (i.e. dial-up) is often the culprit of slow loading pages. It explains that you can tell your browsers not to "Auto Load Images" so you can just get the text of a web page. For anyone that remembers dial-up and 90s Internet this all seems reasonable. And for those that do not, xkcd is using this technology to add the additional joke to his comic. If you did not Auto Load Images then it displayed the text as an alternative - hence, alternative-text - so that you would have some idea what the image was supposed to be an how the website was laid out even if your computer or connection was too slow to handle it.
A Solution?
15 years ago, on computers that couldn't handle loading even the most basic of web pages today, web browsers and websites could handle you clicking the Back button. Today, it's just too hard. How on earth did we, as an Internet society, screw this one up? With all the garbage sites put in our caches and all the dumb cookies that get stored on our computer and all of our personal data that gets stored on servers all around the world you'd think that a major company could write a script that lets something as basic as a Back button work with their page.
I only did a couple years of college programming, so I'm no expert, but how about this? - When I click on a friend's profile in their status update on my News Feed take me there, I do whatever. Then, when I show up at the News Feed again, remember me. I'm signed in, there's no way to screw that one up. Then ask "Did he click the Home or Facebook link to get back here?" It's on their website so they can track if I click that. If I did, then bring me to the top of the page. Otherwise, assume I hit the Back button on my browser, remember which status update I clicked on, and scroll me to that update automatically. The odds that I'm going to my News Feed from a link external to Facebook that isn't the Back button is virtually zero, and if I did Google may way there then I can deal with being scrolled down. I can just click Home and be brought back to the top!
Then you guys know the drill. Implement comparable scripts on other major websites. ??? Profit
Another Sad Thing
I couldn't help but look through other parts of this book. It was quite funny to see old images of the Internet. The nostalgia factor of seeing Internet Explorer on a Windows 95 desktop was great. But then I found something else sad that the Internet hasn't been able to fix.
This 1999 edition of Internet for Dummies also discusses primitive phishing scams. It doesn't call them that, but in the section on Chain Letters a couple of them are what we would now call phishing scams - they are trying to collect personal information or to get you to send money to someone. The term is old enough that it could have been in the book, but from what I remember these kinds of scams were not well publicized in the 90s. Even so, this just tells you how slow society has been about dealing with educating folks about this issue. We've known about them for more than 15 years and people still fall for these scams.
