@Ree@Dreamwidth.org

It's amazing how quickly you get used to Fast Forward once it's there. It's a magic "go to the next thing" button. It also works with the space bar navigation - the spacebar will move you down the page to the next screenful of content, unless you're at the bottom of the page already; then it goes to the next page. It makes reading a friends' page or reading list very quick and pleasant.

Except that it was not working for me on Dreamwidth. It was picking up the rel="next" link, which was the entries I'd already finished reading. It was taking me backwards. Oh, the unhappiness!

I already had a custom Fast Forward file from this debacle and expected my Dreamwidth layout's "Previous 21" link to be picked up just like my InsaneJournal link was. No dice.

Hmm.

Turns out that, for whatever wacky reason, Opera seems to use the generated model of the page rather than the source code - meaning that the CSS generated content adding "<< " before the "Previous 21" was messing me up. All I needed was to add two new lines to my custom fastforward.ini:
;Dreamwidth reading (straight Transmogrified with CSS prepending "<< ")
<< Previous 21=900

Now I am a happy ReeToes again. Yay! (Any number over 400 would have worked; 900 is my way of griping the situation and pretending that it makes a difference.)

I'll still argue that the Next link on the reading page ought to be the one I'm using for Fast Forward, because even though they're older entries, they're the next in the reading page sequence. If I read my reading page in chronological order, clicking "previous" until I'm three pages back, and someone posts a new entry to my reading page while I'm reading, I'll miss an entry somewhere! But if rel="next" goes to older entries, I won't miss anything; I'll just get the same entry I already read twice. I'd rather read something twice than miss something! And Opera's Rewind doesn't work like Fast Forward does (it just goes backwards in the browser history), so Fast Forward has to use the link I haven't visited yet or else Fast Forward and Rewind go to the same place. That makes no sense and hurts me in my brain meats.

Let me put it this way: Your friends page or reading page has five entries per page. You're catching up and are currently on YOURSITE/flist/?skip=15. Which page will you read next: skip=10 or skip=20?

It's skip=20. So ?skip=20, aka "Previous 5" or whatever your layout calls it, is the one that is next in sequence, regardless of chronological order. W3 says nothing about chronology, only order within a series:

For instance, links defined by the LINK element may describe the position of a document within a series of documents.

But I suppose most Dreamwidth users won't even notice the rel-links, and I got my browser to work the way I want, so I won't complain too much whatever Dreamwidth does.