Re: Server control over history?

Kevin Altis (altis@ibeam.jf.intel.com)
Tue, 15 Feb 1994 19:26:18 --100


At 11:11 AM 2/15/94 +0000, Dave_Raggett wrote:
>Neal Holtz writes:
>
>> Is anyone else interested in having the server have some control over
>> a clients history list?
>> ... In these cases, you probably do not want to see these nodes put
>> on the history list.
>
>I have been worrying about this too. For instance if you follow a thread
>from a main document, you will often be offered the chance to click an icon
>to return to the main document. This is clearly an alternative to
>backtracking through the history. It seems to me that clicking the icon
>should be clean up the history so that it is directly equivalent to
>backtracking to the main document. This would avoid the possibility of
>confusion in the user's mind as to the effects of either course of action.
>
>For this to work we need a hint to the browser to pop the history back to
>the point just before the linked document *last* appeared. This could be
>done via an attribute on the <A> element.

In HyperCard (and some other systems), if you wanted to support the kind of
functionality you're talking about, then you used "push card" and "pop
card." Whenever you went to a "child" document, the "parent" would do:
push card
go card x

Then when the user clicked on the "go back" button, the script would do a
"pop card" clearing the history list and jumping back to the last pushed
card. This also allows you to lead the user down a sub-tree of several
links, then jump back to the lead off point.

So, I think what you're really talking about is stack based push/pop idea.

ka