Next/previous, back/forward buttons – the single most important bit of web navigation are being used to mean the opposite to their original use in browsers, because of blogs.
‘Next’ on Technorati means back in time and has an arrow which points to the right. ‘Previous’ on Techcrunch means back in time and has an arrow which points to the left.
Web browsers are in many ways as simple as the universal music playing interface that has existed since the cassette player.
Music interfaces consist of rewind, fast-forward, stop and play.
A browser UI is almost the same and consists of back (rewind), forward (fast-forward), stop (largely redundant in the browser), refresh, home/url-entry (play).
Within a web page the back and forward buttons, ‘next and previous’ are ubiquitous for search results and the, increasingly archetypal, blog style UI.
Because blogs are reverse chronological lists and search engines equate ‘next’ with less relevant or less timely they do exactly the opposite of what browsers do.
The problem is that websites are increasingly following the browser model rather than the search engine one.
For Google or most blogs ‘next’ means back in relevance or time and ‘previous’ means back in browsing history.
Because blogs happen to have reverse chronological postings the ‘next’ ‘previous’ model seems like it is compatible with a browser’s history. It is, but only for this specific case.
It means that ‘previous’ can mean back in browsing history but more recent in time – which is confusing, to say the least.
The solution, I think, should be to assume that the browsers got their first, and that navigation history should be left/right arrows, where left is back in time.
For blog style navigation, where the very simple vertical list was developed, I would suggest that the arrows should be up or down, where back in time is a ‘down’ arrow and more recent is an up arrow.
If this convention were followed, there would be no ambiguity, and a single navigation device with left right and up down arrows, could be used.