In a previous question BalusC gave me good advice on how a button, in place of a commandButton is useful for non ajax navigation. In particular it updates the destination address in the http: position which is useful for the user to bookmark a page.
I tried to use this information to my advantage until I came upon a problem. In a button I tried to use outcome="#{backing.something}" to find out that it gives me a null result. This looks like a timing problem in that action="#{}" is evaluated only when the button is pressed whereas outcome apparently wants a fixed string which gets checked when the page is loaded.
So I went back to commandButton with ajax="false". This has a problem that my navigation address is the page I came from, not the one I am navigating to. This is the wrong bookmark for the user.
I appreciate all the help I have received in stackoverflow on my learning exercise. Ilan