Re: Server control over history?

Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
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Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 19:51:28 --100
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From: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Server control over history?
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> 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.

Can you explain the idea in more detail? Here is my current understanding of it:

Right now each time you follow a link the current document is pushed. The "Back"
button pops the document of the top of the stack, while a "Home" link on a document
behaves like any other link and stupidly pushes the current document, when what we
want it to do is to pop the stack right back to just before the home document.

I guess we could add actions to:

    a) push a marker to the current history stack position
    b) pop a marker and clear the history stack accordingly

These could be implemented using a couple of new attributes for links.
Another idea is to encourage people to use <LINK> rather than <A> for such
"Go Home" links. This means that such links couldn't be scrolled off the window.
For this to be attractive, we also need to allow images for links, perhaps by
adding a SRC attribute to LINK. What do people think of this?

Dave