Navigation via the link element

June 30, 2008 / A few thoughts on adding meta-level navigation.

Pretty much every navigation menu on every site is different. They have commonalities, but obviously they’re not exactly the same. The minute you want to find something else on the site you’re viewing a small part of your brain energy goes into figuring out what’s available to get you there. You probably look for a navigation menu, some persistent pattern of options that outlines the site’s scope and allows you to move across, down into, or up and out. Unless the designer hates you, you’ll probably find the navigation in the same place on each page. It will take you time and effort to move your mouse there. Not much, but some.

Opera’s Navigation Bar.

Another way to provide navigation is through the page’s meta information. If you mark up the head of each page with link element relationships to nearby documents then visitors with a capable user agent can navigate to nearby stuff using their application controls. Opera is one such browser. Note the available Home, Previous, Next and Author buttons on the lower toolbar in the screenshot. There’s also a Firefox plugin called Link Widgets that works in a similar way. The blue arrow buttons are Top, Up, Previous and Next though there are others you can add by customising your toolbar.

Link Widgets for Firefox 1.5⁺.

In this scenario you expend some brain energy seeing which options are available, and some time moving your mouse to the one you want, say the “Previous” button. But the next time you come to a site that supports this type of navigation, you know those buttons are in exactly the same place, the same distance from each other, the same distance from your Reload and Back buttons, i.e. not far.

In HTML4 this was the intention of the link element: to provide a way for the browser to render links through the user interface (though I just learned about it). Opera’s implementation is quite addictive—fast the way a feed reader is when you’re skipping through a list of posts. I’ve no idea how widely supported this is, but it’s another tick for Opera. I think they are slowly winning me over.