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I understand (and endorse) simplicity of design, but that page doesn't even have a link back to the home page. They've gone too far past accessibility into creating a less-accessible page...

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Note well: all accessibility decisions are trade-offs. Do you need a link to the home page if you have a perfectly-good address bar? Some people do; for others, it's a nuisance. If someone with particular accessibility needs has designed a website, and diverged from usual practices, I tend to assume they had a reason for it. (That isn't to say I'll naïvely copy it. Usually I'll ask, but that's no longer possible in this case.) Imo, they should have a link (either <a> or <link>) with rel="up", so the browser's Up button works.

I think you miss the point. This page was linked to you from somewhere. “Home” in that context is back where you came from, I.e. the back button. Finding this page could have come from anywhere and sites don’t have to have pages keep you in their domain. That’s not how the web used to work. Nowadays everyone has their own “site” and it’s a much different eco system from decades ago.

Meh, it's common to want to navigate to the root of a domain to find more information if you've been linked to a subpage that may lack some useful context. You can of course edit the URL by hand, but that's less convenient. Intra-site navigation links have a purpose.

(Perhaps on another timeline browsers would have had an "up" button in addition to "back" and "forward" like filesystem browsers do, but that did not happen. Even <link rel> doesn't have an "up" option, though it does have "prev" and "next" – not that anyone uses <link> for anything but rel="stylesheet" and maybe rel="alternate". EDIT – rel="up" used to exist but was dropped from HTML5 with no reason given. I presume it's nevertheless supported by browsers and eg. screenreaders.)

The first website ever, at CERN [1], is not very consistent about this. Some pages [2] do link "home", but don't use this term: in this particular case, a link to "the WWW project" is given in the first sentence. Some [3] do not.

[1] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[2] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Status.html

[3] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Helping.html

> “Home” in that context is back where you came from, I.e. the back button.

...No, that would be "back", not "home". Those aren't interchangeable terms unless you are coming from a (or your browser's) home page.

Anyway, this page is an FAQ about the site itself. It is not a standalone document. Without the context of the rest of the site, it has no meaning or value. There is no better use case for intra-site links than a page written entirely about content on other parts of the site.

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