Honestly, I don't know where "Next" and "Previous" idiocy stems from, but Older and Newer is what I've used too. Now that I think of it, perhaps I should write Greasemonkey script to try to replace next and previous where applicable.
> I don't know where "Next" and "Previous" idiocy stems from
Next page and previous page.
It is usually the default wording because when making a generic paging routine you don't know if things are going to be sorted ascending or descending, or if they are in date order, numeric order, alphabetic, in the order of the author's first pet's birth month, or something else entirely. Sometimes a framework has no option for changing the captions, and sometimes we as devs are lazy...
Where the ordering is obvious next/previous is fine, but as you say it is much better to be more precise about what you mean if at all possible.
