One of the forgotten treasures of HTML is the link-element. It lives in the head of a page (=is not meant to be rendered as part of the actual page content) and takes some pre-defined values such as "previous", "next", "home" etc. that link to the corresponding pages of the site. So the link-element with the value "next" in page 1 of this thread will point to page 2 etc.

Browsers are meant to use this information to provide navigation buttons outside the page context. A user wouldn't need to search for the corresponding links on the page itself but will always find a "next" button in the same place, very much like the back-button we know. Opera, IIRC, does this. A plugin for Firefox is available. IE, of course, does nothing - neither does microB.

I wonder if this feature, although hardly used so far in the desktop world, could make browsing easier on small, mobile devices and on the tablets in particular. Imagine you wouldn't need to tap on the tiny [1][2][3]...-links below, but have either the D-pad, onscreen buttons in the browser toolbar or even gestures mapped to "next" and "up" or "index" etc. - I think it could help.

Is there a way to try this with the current software? Would either microB or Fennec allow for an adapted version of the FF-plugin to be used with Maemo? Also: Does anybody here know of usability studies that involved this kind of navigation aid for browsing on mobile devices?