[Sigia-l] Advertisers have ruined the Back Button!

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

Over the past several weeks, DoubleClick, AtlasDMT, and other
web-adversiting providers have started to use <iframe>s to serve up
their ad banners. For those of you who don't know, an <iframe> is a
infrequently-used HTML tag that allows a web page to include another web
page within a new frame without having to create a traditional frameset
- that is, the 'child' frame is actually contained within the 'parent'
page.

One side effect of an <iframe> is that it wrecks the Back button. When a
page containig <iframe>s loads into the browser, the browser history
gets populated not only with the page itself, but with each <iframe>
page as well. Clicking the Back button from such a page will simply
reload one of the page's <iframe>s, not take the user back to (what they
thought was) the previous page they visited. A typical user will likely
become quite confused when they click the Back button and nothing
happens. Sometimes the user will have to click the Back button more than
*four times* to compensate for each <iframe> ad banner on the page. 

Countless web sites, including massively popular sites like Yahoo!,
Citysearch, About.com, use DoubleClick and others to fill their
advertising spaces, so this decision must be affecting millions of
people every day. IMHO, this could be even worse than the pop-under
phenomenon.

(What's worse is that many of these providers don't seem to be able to
meet their demand - more often than not, in my experience, these
<iframe>s display only a 404 error!)

We're always talking about how bad Flash is because it ruins the Back
button, but we're starting to see traditional web sites wreck the Back
button as well. For a site where users spend a lot of time browsing
through the same site, the <iframe> is ruinous. For example,
http://www.citysearch.com is now damn near impossible to use - I wonder
what the IA and usability folks at Citysearch think about this? What do
the rest of you think of this development? Is this the death of the Back
button? Can we stop them?

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com