Nilesh's Weblog

Site Navigation Bar

If you are using Mozilla, and have shut off the site navigation bar (View Menu » Show/Hide » Site Navigation Bar » Show Only As Needed) you are missing a lot both as a reader as well as a blogger. If you visit my site, on the site navigation bar on clicking More, you'll get quick access to various links on my site. There are links for help, search and author page. Additionally there are bookmarks for various sections on the site. If you go to the archives, the previous and next buttons get enabled for easy browsing of archives. The site structure is such that moving vertically and horizontally becomes easier. For more information of the actual semantics, see the header section source of this page (<link> tags).

Now, you'll ask, what is the advantage of doing this? People using a standards compliant browser will have ease moving around the site and also it is beneficial for search engines when they are crawling the site. If it is good for search engines, it is good for the webmaster as well. Mozilla uses these tags to pre-fetch the next and previous documents. You can use them to specify a different language version of the page, or a printed version(PS) or the RSS version. Movabletype templates have <link> tags in their basic form. But you can do a lot more with them - like Slashdot does.