What is Flip Ahead browsing in IE10?

One of the major feature areas in IE10 is the support for touch. In addition to supporting touch-based browsing on any web page, IE10 does contain features that let web developers tune their web sites or applications to better support touch-based browsing.

In IE10 and onwards, one of such features is called Flip Ahead browsing. This feature is aimed at pages that display a long list of something, divided into multiple pages. For instance, search results might be such a page, with links to next and previous pages.

To support Flip Ahead, you'd decorate these next and previous links with a little additional information, so that the browser knows to which page navigate to when the user flips, either left or right.

The key HTML you need to enable Flip Ahead is the link tag, as shown here:

<link rel="next" href="/search/results.aspx?page=2">

The presence of this link tag indicates IE10 that the destination of the link (the href attribute) is considered the next page in sequence. You could also have used the "prev" value to specify the previous page in the browsing ("flipping") sequence. Note that you don't need a "prev" link on the first page, nor a "next" link on the last page, as there only a need to go one direction, forward or backward.

Since adding such links is pretty much trivial to any web application, I'd suggest that you study the Flip Ahead specs, and then start using this tag. If some other browser doesn't support these tags, they won't affect the normal paging mechanism already on your page.