> I have an odd habit of always using the "back" button to get to some, defined-only-in-my-head, "starting point."

That's funny. I have that same basic habit/need. I have to go back to a base before surfing somewhere else -- I guess becaues the page stack is always in the back of my head somewhere, and branching out to all kinds of different places on the same stack is too confusing. I will often branch out on purpose if I want to save a reference to some page on the stack, but only then.

My wife, on the other hand, will surf all day and never use the back button. So when I sit down at the computer, the first thing I do is to send Netscape back to the home page (why, the RinkWorks home page, of course!), and sometimes not even the "Go" menu has enough entries to go back that far. I guess I just don't understand.

But stranger still, something I've NEVER understood, not now, not when I started mucking around on the web before it was a mainstream thing: why on earth would people want "back to" links on subpages of sites that point back at the main page? If you were at the main page, then go to a subpage, then follow the *link* back to the main page, you've just mucked up the page stack senselessly, making it harder and messier to return anywhere *else* you've gone to using ANY of the browser features that let you do so.

Actually I can think of one reason to have them that comes up fairly frequently, if less so -- if somehow you never visited the main page in the first place but landed on a subpage, either by search engine or bookmark or external link, then a "main page" link at the bottom of the page could be quite useful. And those cases have come up; but so too have people requested "back" links for the silly reason. Now all my pages have back links, and everybody's happy. But I don't get half the people that use them.