Back by - Joseph Ganci 1. The Navigate
icon forces you to a Framework page. Because of this, you are forced to think
and program in a more modular fashion. GoTo, on the other hand, allows you
to jump ANYWHERE at ANY time, which leads to the worst kind of spaghetti code.
I have spent more time (and client dollars) fixing their code when they bring
me onto a project two days before it's due just trying to travel the many
strings of GoTos. You'd feel the same way I do if you had to go through that
kind of (well-paying) hell. 2. GoTo is always
a one-way trip. Navigate icons can be set to Call and Return, which makes
them much more suitable for subroutines (or the closest thing we have to them
in Authorware anyway). If you tried to set up a subroutine with a GoTo,
you would have to do all the dirty work yourself. 3. All the built-in
functionality of the navigate icon lets you use it in a variety of ways that
the GoTo cannot match. By simply setting my navigate to next, back, last,
first, search, etc., I'm once again letting Authorware (and the kind engineers
who programmed it) do the dirty work for me. Yes, if you're advanced enough
in Authorware you could mimic some of the functionality with GoTos, but not
too many are at that stage in ratio of the entire Authorware population. By
this I mean, too many would explicitly state the destination of the next page
with a @"icontitle" approach rather than using the IconNext function, for
instance, leading to a lot of rework when the pages suddenly change order,
are deleted, or are added to. Why bother when the Navigate icon does that
for us beautifully? I've seen too
many claims that without the GoTo function in Authorware, some things could
not get done. I promise you that aside from when I was a newbie nine years
ago, I have never used the GoTo function in any of my projects except once
for illustration purposes. If you were to take the GoTo function out of Authorware
today, I would still be able to accomplish everything I have thus far in a
good modular fashion.
11003 - Some Differences Between the Navigate Icon and the GoTo Function (20 June 1999)
The differences between
the navigate icon and the GoTo function as they are used in Authorware
are as follows:
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