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

[email]

You CAN stop them. Let them know of your frustration. And don't visit 
those sites anymore. 

> 
> 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
> 
> 
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Thanks,

Brett Ingram
User Experience Architect