Daily Archives:February 14th, 2005

Reading backwards

Weblogs are almost always organised in reverse-chronological order; the most recent posts first. This gives a feeling of the most important news headlines being at the top of the page, with older stuff ‘below the fold’, and was important when most people read blogs using their web browser. It’s less vital now that so many are using RSS readers which highlight what’s new for you anyway.

Anyway, it means that there’s an increasing number of web pages that I read backwards, or at least scroll parts of them backwards in order to follow the development of an idea. Is this something we’ll all do naturally in a few years?

I’ve often thought that blogs should show the most recent days first, but should go forward chronologically within a day.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser