On Jan 17, 2008, at 5:11 AM, Jamie Stewart wrote:
One is by using JavaScript, history.back() is what you will want to
use. If you don't want to use JavaScript it is possible through
code, well with .Net at least. You can easily access the
UrlRefferer which gives you the full URL of the previous page.
Of course, disabling the browser back button is "evil" and
unnecessary...
The JS solution might work, but the question is how far back in the
history one must go to escape the clutches of the evil app.
In my day job, the library's web site offers patrons access to
various subscription databases - the user authenticates with a valid
library card number on our site and is then passed forward to the
database site. (Oh yes, and the back button does work). Almost daily
we get complaints from patrons that the authentication doesn't work
for them. In almost every instance we find they have Norton Internet
Security installed. By default Norton suppresses referring URLs. This
is a hugely popular app that most users install and never even look
at the settings.
So neither of these solutions will be 100% reliable.
I'm probably a bit of an extremist, but I'm probably not alone - if I
visit a site that tries to keep me imprisoned like this, I close the
browser window and *never* return. No site is so compelling and so
unique as to require that I (or any other user) put up with this abuse.
Can you ask the developers why and how they created this
dysfunctionality? My guess is that there's some kind of preprocessing
that goes on before allowing the user into the site itself, and the
back button takes the user back to that page, which bumps them
forward again. There is no technical constraint that requires this
behavior. I seem to recall some "wisdom" from the 90s that proclaimed
the desirability of keeping users on your site at all costs, but that
has long since been discounted. But if there really is some
compelling non-technical reason for not allowing users to escape back
the way they came, then I'd suggest that this is a case where opening
a new window would be justifiable.
Andrew
***
List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm
Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
***