This is an article I wrote over 10 years ago about an online documentation system with a clever navigation menu that I created for a client. The technology is way outdated but my thinking on reducing the users “astonishment” factor has remained consistent.
Building a Dynamic Two-Level Navigation Bar in HTML
Introduction
One of my recent online documentation projects involved a fairly complex navigation scheme combined with a firm requirement concerning ease of maintenance. The complex navigation was partly the result of transferring documents created for a print environment to a hyperlinked HTML environment. The original “book/chapter/paragraph” metaphor resolved into a “major section/minor section/subsection/paragraph” organization. The major and minor sections were to be accessed via corresponding major and minor menus located in the top navigation frame of the application (see Figure 1).
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