Links

[jack]

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004880.html

It comes to something when you hear breaking news by reading the language log :)

javascript:if(document.referrer) document.location = document.referrer;

This one is cool. Obvious, but I never thought of it. It takes you back to a page the current page was linked from (ie. its referrer), so when you've forgotten why you opened a tab (say, because the link was phrased as a witty comment that only makes sense when you've already read the page), you can just go and see.

http://www.jimwegryn.com/Names/Surnames.htm

Comments on surnames, but quite funny.

Comments

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

LOL on the surnames link :-D

Thou shalt not suffer a misplaced apostrophe to live

[simont]

Its referrer!

Also, the href attribute in your <a> seems to have disappeared, but selecting that Javascript "URL" and middle-clicking it into a Firefox tab does seem to work. (Almost annoyingly, actually, since I was on the point of trying to disable that middle-click behaviour because it's nearly always a thundering inconvenience and not what I wanted. To now find a genuinely useful purpose for it ruins my plan.)

Re: Thou shalt not suffer a misplaced apostrophe to live

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Whoops! Thank you, edited. I'm sure I had some reason for saying "it is", but I can't remember what.

Whoops again. I didn't check. Did livejournal strip it out?

disable that middle-click behaviour

Hm. Maybe they should remap it to ctrl-alt-l-middle-click? Or have some way of turning things that look like links into links without being intrustive?

[simont]

Aha, no, I've worked it out. You make that piece of Javascript a bookmark, and then you have a "Referrer" button in your personal toolbar or your bookmarks menu (as you choose) which you can hit any time you want. Now I can get back to wanting to disable the middle-click paste-URL behaviour.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah! Sorry. I forgot to explain that clearly in my post, yes, that's the idea. The only flaw is that its button has a text caption when a picture would be better.

I thought you meant something about following the link because my link was broken.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That really ought to be a browser feature though - new tabs should just inherit the history of the one they were opened from.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. Well, there might be some reason to do it other than a full history[1], but it should be integrated in the browser. I found this when I was looking for a firefox plugin that would show the referrer in some way, preferably by showing the sentence fragment with the link in as a tooltip on the tab, but when I found this it seemed to do the job so I decided not to look further.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

What was [1] going to be? I don't see why it shouldn't be the full history; if it isn't then at some point you can't press Back and I can't see any obvious value to that. Obviously it ought not to take any more storage and even if it did a list of a few thousand URLs is pretty cheap compared to all the other rubbish we keep on disk these days.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Here http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/365107.html :) Eg. if you follow a link from an lj post into a new tab, and browse around that site and get lost, you can hit back infinitely many times to get back to where you started browsing it, whereas if that took you back to the previous page too, you can accidentally end up with two copies of the post, and accidentally reply to them separately or something.

On balance having the full history is probably more useful, but it's not strictly better :) Perhaps a good feature (which no doubt exists somewhere) which would make them more similar would be if "back" distinguished between "links between the same subdomain", "between the same domain", "into a new domain", "new links entered in the bar directly".