2001-04-05

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2001-12-31

I was designing a look for my homepage with HTML4.0 standard. I had planned that this would be my cool looking webpage with lots of graphics. Taking a survey of existing web pages, two cool things stand out: Tabbed navigational button on top of the page, and 3 column look. Personally, I hate the three column look. It looks way to busy for my taste. Some people like them because the text isn't stretched out too long, but the solution is to either use bigger font, or shrink the window a bit. Anyway, I'd like my visitors to be able to immediately tell which is what, and 3 column look is too busy for my taste.

So that leaves me with tabbed navigational buttons on top of the page. I like this very much. Amazon uses this very effectively. The problem is that I don't have a guarantee that my sections will stay the same. Amazon circumvented this by fixing the header. This means the whole header will be guaranteed to fit. Later on, they added another line because they have too many. At the time of this writing, they have a dynamic header that changes depending upon your which section you visited. Very effective. Very nice.

The problem with that, is that the size is necessarily fixed. Unfortunately for me, I like flexibility. I demand it. I must have it! If you look at my navigation part, you'll see it changes depending on where you are, not where you're from. That way, you'll immediately know where you are. Having dynamic navigation will hide this information. That's fine if you come in from the top, but that does make it harder to bookmark specific web pages nested deep inside. With flexible formation, I won't have that problem.

So, the question is how to keep that tabbed look while retaining flexibility? I experimented with pop-up window and other fancy technique such as remote control (it was popular in the web early years), but decided that they, too, suffer from flexibility problem. The next thing to do is obvious: just change the orientation from horizontal at the top to vertical on the side.

That works, but then I wonder whether or not a simple roll-over would be just as effective. Still, the idea of having a vertical side tabbed navigation bar intriqued me. I'll do some sketchings later. We'll see.