Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

This is merely a suggestion! When I am scrolling through the list of 386 decks and I click on one to view it, I click on the back button to get back to the list, I am knocked back to the top of the list and not on the position of the deck I was viewing. this is slightly inconvienient to be knocked back the the a decks when I had already made it significantly down the alphabet. I have to scroll down to whereever it was I was in the alphabet. Can this be fixed? When surfing on the 'net, the back button takes me to the last position of the previous web page, so I know this can be done.

thanks Frances

I second this wish!

Katrin-srose

And a third!

Christine

Hi Frances (and Katrin and Christine),

I know the behaviour you mean, it is a feature of Internet Explorer and probably other browsers called Smart Navigation. A web designer can set a flag which gets IE to use this, and because the Tarot Zone is hosted in a cut down version of IE I could do the same here. This would be at the cost of two things though.

Smart navigation would only work if the back and forward buttons simply called the GoBack and GoForward methods of the browser. That sounds sensible doesn't it? Don't they do that already?

They don't, and the reason is this: if you spend a few minutes on the deck exchange applying different filters and sorts, as far as the browser is concerned you are visiting a series of different URLs, even though you are still on the same page (the deck exchange). The URLs might for example be DeckExchange.htm?Sort=Name&SortOrder=Ascending or DeckExchange.htm?Filter=Family&MyDecksOnly=True. When you navigate backwards through a series of URLS like this in IE with the back button what you see is a long series of snapshots of the page in various states. You have probably also seen this behaviour many times on the web, when you have been filling in forms etc. I think it is undesirable. My guess is that if you start in the forum and then spend ten minutes in the deck exchange, you want the back button to take you back to the forum straight away, not to take you back via several views of the same page. For this reason, I customized the navigation in the Tarot Zone so it uses its own list of pages visited, only updating the list when the user visits a different page (not just a different URL). But this means that each page is loaded afresh - so no Smart Navigation.

The other reason is that I want users to always see each page in the OTZ as fresh as possible, so I have set another property on many pages which tells the browser to always load them afresh, and never get a page out of its cache. This is also incompatible with Smart Navigation. On balance I think it is preferable, because if I allowed page caching you might post in the forum, upload a deck etc and then when you go back to see the list, your post or your deck would not be there. I think this would confuse people. They might not realise they need to press F5 or use the refresh button to get the most recent version of the page.

In case you were wondering, I don't have the No Caching attribute set everywhere because it is inefficient to always get a fresh page when it is unlikely to have changed, so sometimes you might still want to refresh the page in the OTZ. But in the dynamic pages like the decks list, which is the page in question, I do have it set.

As usual it is a case of trading off one thing against another. I know that many OTZ users have some programming knowledge or are web designers, so if anyone knows an easy way around this then please do share it!

Actually I think I can achieve the same effect on this particular page, by reading off the scroller position and making that a page variable too, then scrolling to that position when the page is revisited. It will take a bit longer because it will have to be programmed manually and I might need to play around a bit to get it right. I have written it down so I won't forget it .)

Richard