This is the way that I browse, but I think it works differently for us than for others, since I know a lot of people who get lost doing this. I read link-heavy sites tab by tab, left-to-right, opening more as I go. The way Google Chrome opens tabs, this ends up being a depth-first search, and means that if I have fifty tabs open, the last one is almost always a child of the page I started on, while I might be eight levels deep in an entirely different branch.
My code-style explanation is this. When I click a link, I subconsciously allocate space for the new information. I store pointers to it, and start duck typing it, integrating it into my existing knowledge before I even have it. All of these connections are referenced by the word or word-phrase that was hyperlinked. When I get to the page, I fill in the knowledge, create back-references, clean up any dangling pointers that didn’t get addressed, and erase the tag phrase from my short term memory.
On the other hand, if I couldn’t efficiently reference content by word phrase tags, this wouldn’t work. I’d need context to remind me what the page I’m reading relates to, and why I opened it in the first place. If all pages had at the top the sentence or paragraph that contained the hyperlink that the user clicked on, this context would be apparent, and I think this is the kind of thing that Raemon is looking for. It might take some javascript-fu to get that working, but it would be a cool browser extension.
This is the way that I browse, but I think it works differently for us than for others, since I know a lot of people who get lost doing this. I read link-heavy sites tab by tab, left-to-right, opening more as I go. The way Google Chrome opens tabs, this ends up being a depth-first search, and means that if I have fifty tabs open, the last one is almost always a child of the page I started on, while I might be eight levels deep in an entirely different branch.
My code-style explanation is this. When I click a link, I subconsciously allocate space for the new information. I store pointers to it, and start duck typing it, integrating it into my existing knowledge before I even have it. All of these connections are referenced by the word or word-phrase that was hyperlinked. When I get to the page, I fill in the knowledge, create back-references, clean up any dangling pointers that didn’t get addressed, and erase the tag phrase from my short term memory.
On the other hand, if I couldn’t efficiently reference content by word phrase tags, this wouldn’t work. I’d need context to remind me what the page I’m reading relates to, and why I opened it in the first place. If all pages had at the top the sentence or paragraph that contained the hyperlink that the user clicked on, this context would be apparent, and I think this is the kind of thing that Raemon is looking for. It might take some javascript-fu to get that working, but it would be a cool browser extension.