From: Klaus-Peter Wessel <klaus-peter.wessel@airbus.dasa.de> With rindex.html I have a problem in understanding it.
"To access directly the country, state, province, or region you wish to research, press here: Index of States, Provinces, and Regions"
is written at the top of http://www.genealogy.com/gene/reg/ger1990.htm
This opens rindex.htm
When I (with the eye of a casual user) point to a URL on that rindex.htm page, I would assume that the page for that specific region (or country) will be opened. But what is opened is in most cases just ger1871.htm or ger1990.htm (o.k. with the mentioned country Name-tag). In my opinion this is one click too much, isn't it?
Should the aim of rindex.htm not be, to open "directly the country, state, province, or region you wish to research..." ?
The question is a good one. The idea of this arrangement is not merely to blindly take "surfers" to what they think they want, but rather, since we do not know how much they know, to educate them so as to make decisions in the proper context. This may seem less necessary in a case like Bremen than it is with a confusing concept like Prussia, but for consistency of expectation it seems a good idea to do the same thing in all cases. Of course once they have found a page that they like, they will link to it from their own bookmarks file and be able to bypass this. Rick