The reverse chronological nature of weblogs seem to wreak havoc when designing entry navigation.

Entry navigation is being able to navigate to previous postings in your journal stream. In Tabulas, it looks like this:

You may think to yourself, "Jeez, that's so simple. What's so hard to figure out about that?"

The first problem revolves around terminology: most sites seem to be fixated on "Older/Newer" and "Previous/Next".

While "older/newer" is self-explanatory, "previous/next" brims with ambiguity. The reverse chronological nature of weblogs means that "previous" could mean one of two things: "go back to previous page (go forward in time)" or "go back chronologically."

The second problem seems to revolve around whether "Older" should be on the left, or the right. Browser conventions place "Back" on the left - but when you're reading a weblog, you don't know where you're going to end up - in that case, does left mean "go back in time" or "go back to my last known page?"

Let me demonstrate the confusion by showing screenshots from other journaling sites. For each site, I've also labelled which link actually goes "back in time," which in this case will mean "reading entries that were posted at a previous time."

MySpace: (left-side "Older" goes back in time)

Xanga: (right-side "Next" goes back in time)

LiveJournal: (left-side "Previous" goes back in time)

WordPress: (right-side "Older" goes back in time)

Another WordPress Theme: (left-side "Previous" goes back in time)

Of course, if you're Blogger, you don't even support entry navigation :)

Tabulas: (right-side "Older" goes back in time)

Twitter: (right-side "Older" goes back in time)

Flickr: (right-side "Previous" goes back in time)

This is horrible - you'd think some standard for this would have percolated already ... now all we're doing is betraying the trust of users, who expect some level of consistency!

Is anybody ever frustrated by this, too?