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Developer Tim Bray, of XML fame, has written an ode to The Sacred "Back" Button.
Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn't have a way to "Go Back". This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It's a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let's demand perfection.
Why it matters · Nobody anywhere is smart enough to build an application that won't, in some situations, confuse its users. The Back option removes fear and makes people more willing to explore features, because they know they can always back out. It was one of the reasons why the nascent browsers were so much better than the Visual Basic, X11, and character-based interface dinosaurs that then stomped the earth.
Thus I was delighted, at the advent of Android, that the early phones had physical "back" buttons.
[...] Nowadays Android phones don't have the button, but do offer a universal "Back" gesture and, as an Android developer, you don't have to do anything special to get sane, user-friendly behavior. I notice that when I use iOS apps, they always provide a back arrow somewhere up in the top left corner; don't know if that costs developers extra work.
[...] People using your software generally have a well-developed expectation of what Back should do at any point in time, and any time you don't meet that expectation you've committed a grievous sin, one should remedy right now.
The undo function has been around since the beginning, though invented and reinvented several times. Some systems got it much later than others, but now its presence is universally expected.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 13 2021, @07:17AM (3 children)
However, I'm sure we can agree - browser back buttons were so much better than ASCII!
(Was that a stupid joke at the donkey-like stupidity of braying Bray, or was it a subtle insight into the fact that gopher provided you with a way of backing out before any back button appeared in any graphical browser...)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday April 13 2021, @08:52AM (2 children)
Interesting that you mention that, Bray brays that the functioning of back has been mangled in all sorts of broken ways by different apps so that what you think is a normal back action changes depending on which app you're in. My immediate reaction was "sounds like X11 WMs, or Unix distros, or ...". If geeks built cars, on one of them the steering wheel would steer the car, on another it would change gears, on a third it would wind the windows up and down, on a fourth it would change radio stations, on a fifth...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 13 2021, @10:43AM (1 child)
Fortunately w3m and lynx seem to still do the right thing.
Thank god some software is unmaintained - perhaps it can stay undefiled by the wrongthink.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:36PM
> All I think is necessary for a back button is that it return me whence I came, nothing more.
By which you mean the rendered viewport content? Works for me on HTML sites, doesn't work on many XMLHttpRequest laden corporate monstrosities. We once had the same thing with Java applets, ActiveX and then Flash - fresh paycheck for every cycle of obsolescence.