Comment by pibaker
16 days ago
Disagreed. In everyday speech "going back" means going to where you came from. If I'm at a friend's place at 123 Main Street and I tell him I'm going back, what I'm saying is I'm heading back to my home, not to 122 Main Street. The web should work similarly.
And the idea of logical navigation is flawed because most websites don't have a well defined logical structure, nor is it feasible to have one. What is the previous page of a Wikipedia article, or an HN submission, or an Amazon listing, or a search result of cheapest direct flights between New York and Cancun? With how the back button currently works, at least there is consistency in what to expect when clicking it. Under your suggestion, there is no way a user knows what the back button does on each website unless he clicks on it first and find out himself.
I'm not talking about the back button. I'm talking about history.back() API. If you have a "back" button that is inside the page's viewport, it should work based on the page's logical model. So you go back from Page 5 to Page 4, regardless of where you were before. Only back buttons outside the viewport should work based on browser history. The history is part of the browser it's not part of the page.