Re: Excluding page from back button history

Tim Streater wrote:
In article <5rt2d6F16ho9uU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:
In article <_IWdnYkJg6FhfcXanZ2dnUVZ_sSlnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
"David E. Ross" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 12/3/2007 6:34 PM, David E. Ross wrote:
On 12/3/2007 2:42 AM, jim.richardson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi all,

I'd like a page to be excluded from the back button history, that is,
when a user hits their browser's back button, it never backs into this
particular page.

Can anybody please tell me how to do this?

I thought perhaps there would be some kind of special meta tag that
says something like "exclude me from browser's history", but have been
unable to find what I'm looking for.

Any pointers would be very much appreciated.
The most effective way to do that is to launch the page in a new window.
However, that too is considered user-hostile. Launching a new window
is so much condemned that several browsers now have the options to
display such pages in a new tab on the same window and even to reuse the
current window for the page, defeating any attempt to force a new window.

Note that one of the "W3C Quality Assurance Tips for Webmasters" at
<http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/> is subtitled: "Don't break the back
button!" Research shows that the Back button is one of the two most
frequently used capabilities of browsers.

You might also look at #1 under Jakob Nielsen's "The Top Ten Web Design
Mistakes of 1999" at <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html>. While
not recent, it's still apropriate.
I must say that, still, I would like to be able to do it. One of the pages here reloads the contents of a frame depending on buttons the user presses. All of that seems to go in the history stack. I would like to be able to exclude that, so that the Back button does something useful from this page.
Suppose the useful thing you would like it to do was actually 10 pages ago. If the user wants to go back to that point, he would assume that the Back button *wouldn't* take him there, at least not without hitting it 10 times, at which point he will either (a) use the pop-up menu next to the Back button to try to go there directly, in which case your machination won't have made any difference--except perhaps make it more *difficult* for the user to find it, since in eyeballing the list he won't be expecting to find it at the top, or (b) look for a link to take him there directly, which he will expect to see given that this is a page that's so clearly useful for him at this point.

The general problem with trying to "help" users by making controls act unexpectedly is that the number of people you hinder and confuse can exceed the number of people you help.

These pages are seen by a limited audience. If I were able to do that, and they didn't like it, they'd soon let me know. It's the sort of feature request I get, in fact.

That sounds reasonable, but think it through. A user who comes up with an idea like that is thinking about it from the wrong end. *He* detects a problem and *he* conceives a solution--but that doesn't do any good if all the other people who might encounter the same problem don't already know that the peculiar solution has been provided and therefore will never perform whatever action you configured to get them where they want to go.
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