Dynamic Site Navigation
A Browser-Independent Approach to Web-Site Navigation
By Ryan Alyn Porter and Jennifer Selph
Most people don't particularly care whether Java is a better technology than ActiveX, or whether VBScript is better than JavaScript. They just want a decent set of tools for spicing up Web sites without excluding potential visitors. We have developed a simple tool for maintaining a flexible, site-wide navigation scheme; our utility, NavTool, is as portable from browser to browser as HTML itself.
NavTool has various uses, but it was designed with a specific scenario in mind. We have organized the material on our corporate Web site into an intuitive hierarchy of documents, but they are multiplying at a frightening rate. To allow visitors to easily navigate this mess, we developed a "navigator widget," built entirely out of HTML constructs and included at the top of every page. The example in this article uses a simple table structure to arrange a series of small images; see
Figure 1. This widget is similar to navigation systems found in Web sites all over the Internet; its originality lies in its dynamic interface, which changes as the visitor moves from one page to the next.
Figure 2 provides an abridged example of this dynamism. The image on the left is the navigation widget, as seen on the home page.
