John Muir's Birthplace

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Content updated Wed, 23 Jun 1999 08:56:39 GMT

This Web Site... [home]

This Web Site...

Site Navigation Tips

Page Title Conventions

The page title of the default file in each of the subdirectories - in this server's case index.html - normally ends in an ellipsis (...). This Web Site... is an example. Such a title also signifies the [home] page of the subdirectory. Usually the page title of subordinate files will include the 'home' page title as a prefix. See the title of this page for instance.

Date and Time Stamps

Each file is stamped with the date and time of last modification of the content. Since the content is, in effect, rendered within a presentation template this means that the modification date of the file is a true date of modification and is not affected by changes to the 'look and feel' of the site.

Providing a Context for Navigation

A subtle indicator of the context of a page can be seen in the navigation menu at the top right of each page. There is normally a natural browsing sequence for, say, pages comprising on-line lecture notes. Apart from the first and last pages in the sequence each page will have a predecessor and a successor - it's 'neighbours'. In the menu the current page's title is given in plain text and it's predecessor will be shown above in a hypertext link and it's successor will be shown below in a hypertext link. The navigation menu also has a link to the home page. This 'home page' is normally the default file of the current subdirectory and the link appears thus [home].

Button Navigation

Navigating to 'neighbouring' pages is also made obvious by the use of 'previous' and 'next' buttons as illustrated in the menu at the top right of each page. These buttons come into play at the end of the page too (and for convenience shown here on the right). You may notice that if there is no previous page then the left arrow button is omitted. Similarly, if there is no next page the right arrow button is omitted.

The placement of the navigation menu at the top right and the navigation buttons at the bottom right means that minimal mouse movement is required when browsing my pages. Netscape browsers also have the ability to scroll down a page at a time at each press of the space bar. You should find that you can leave the mouse pointer at the bottom right of a page and poised ready to click on the 'next page' button.

Logo Navigation

Generally the various 'logos' that appear at the top of each page are links to the relevant home page. For example the John Muir Birthplace logo shoiwn above is a hypertext link to the home page of http://www.muir-birthplace.org

URL Navigation

In the top right hand corner of each page is a reference to the actual URL of the document. Like so:

http://www.djma.org.uk/about/site/navigation.html

The italicised component of the URL - http://www.djma.org.uk/ - is the root of this web site and the hypertext link refers to the whole thing. The non-italicised component - in this case about/site/navigation.html - is the path relative to that root, and each directory in this part of the URL forms a hypertext link to the corresponding index.html. This is much harder to explain than it is to see it in action so just check it out. In actual fact these links are relative URLs which means that the web pages can be rendered to a local hard drive and the navigation between them is as if they were on the web server.

There is another instance of the navigable URL in the footer of each page. There is a subtle difference between the two URLs in that the footer version has a reference to a named anchor that links back to the top of the current page. Like so:

http://www.djma.org.uk/about/site/navigation.html#top

[Note: if your browser apparently shows a space between http://www.djma.org.uk/ and about/site/navigation.html then this is just an consequence of using <i></i> markup to emphasise the root component of the URL.]

Index of Links Navigation

Last, but by no means least, is the navigation aid that is usually just found on an index.html (home) page. The Index of Links menu is similar to that shown on the left. Note that the current page is shown as plain text. As this menu normally appears on the home page it would normally show This Web Site... in plain text and the remaining title references would appear as hypertext. Also note that the positoning of the menu items indicates their sequence. In this case the About... link above This Web Site... indicates that this is a home page higher up the hierarchy.