Navigation in Hypertext

Keeping Track

Keeping track permits readers to know and come back to what they have already visited. Some means of keeping track may be history lists or highlight.

History lists contain the names of visited nodes. According to De Bra, there are two possible ways to implement a history list:

• A complete history list acts as a logfile, showing all (URLs or titles of) nodes you visited before. Nodes may or may not end up twice in the list when you visit them again, either by accident or by following links backwards.
• An abbreviated history list only keeps those nodes that were not "backed out of" by following links backwards.

This is a history list provided by Internet Explorer. This web browser permits users to determine how much they want to keep in the history list, in term of days. Storyspace has another implementation of history list:

Source: http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/cpace/misc/6212/lectures/rhetoric/roadmap.html

This Storyspace's road map give readers the recently visited lexias and lexias that have links to the current lexia, as well as lexias that the current lexia links to.

Some hypertext systems use highlighting to mark a user's visited nodes. They may use a different color, or different underlining or background for the link to those nodes. However, bookmarks also offer this information.

Last modified: 6 Nov 2002 by Kathy Nguyen Dang