August 2007
Beginner
416 pages
12h 16m
English
Content preview from Designing Web NavigationBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 13. Navigation and Rich Web Applicatios
"No matter what the subject be, there is only one course for the beginner; he must at first accept a discipline imposed from without, but only as the means of obtaining freedom for, and strengthening himself in, his own method of expression."
—Igor Stravinsky
Consider for a moment the difference between surfing the web and using a program native to your computer, such as a word processor. At the heart of web navigation is the hyperlink, which connects pages by URL addresses. The interaction involved is fairly straightforward: clicking a link sends a request to a server at the corresponding address. After the requested files are returned, a browser renders a static page, which may contain more links leading to more web pages.
With desktop programs, you typically access files you've created that are stored locally on your computer. Clicking menu options such as Paste or Save doesn't take you to another document via a link, but instead performs an action. Sure, there is help text and you can link documents together, but for the most part, software navigation is about editing, saving, and manipulating text, graphics, or a file in some way. Compared to web navigation, this type of interaction is more dynamic, and it introduces the concepts of behavior and functionality.
But as new web technologies evolve, designers can increasingly simulate the type of interaction found in desktop software online. Consequently, the Web is becoming more and ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.