Using Mozilla's Site Navigation Bar

Using Mozilla's Site Navigation Bar
By: Sean McMains on 7/28/2004; 4:20 PM

Mozilla has a neat feature called a "Site Navigation Bar." (Release 1.0 doesn't have this feature active. You'll have to use 1.1a or one of the daily builds to see it.) It puts a bar at the top of the screen that can link to various pages within or versions of your site.

I hacked around with this feature for a while today, and got a pretty usable version on my Conversant site. If you have an appropriate version of Mozilla, you used to be able to see it in action here [sample offline, as I've been messing about with my templates a bit]. (You might have to turn on the feature: view->show/hide->site navigation bar.)

Here's what I added to the HEAD section of my template to get this working across my site:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Ruminations Lite (Mobile Friendly)" href="http://www.mcmains.net/ruminationstogo">
<link rel="home" type="text/html" title="McMains Chronicles Home" href="http://www.mcmains.net/">
<link rel="bookmark" type="text/html" title="Current Family Update" href="http://www.mcmains.net/current">
<link rel="bookmark" type="text/html" title="Update Archive" href="http://www.mcmains.net/stories/">
<link rel="bookmark" type="text/html" title="Sean's Ruminations" href="http://www.mcmains.net/ruminations">
<link rel="bookmark" type="text/html" title="Messages" href="http://www.mcmains.net/calendar">
<link rel="bookmark" type="text/html" title="Leave a Message" href="http://www.mcmains.net/__newThread__">
<link rel="help" type="text/html" title="FAQ" href="http://www.mcmains.net/faq">
<link rel="next" type="text/html" href="<!--#pageURL path="next"-->">
<link rel="prev" type="text/html" href="<!--#pageURL path="prev"-->">
<link rel="first" type="text/html" href="<!--#pageURL path="first"-->">
<link rel="last" type="text/html" href="<!--#pageURL path="last"-->">

Especially of interest are the last few lines, which take advantage of one of Conversant's simple macros to build these navigational links on the fly. (Wish list: if you're viewing a particular message number, it would be nice if the "next" URL referred to the next message number.)

Enjoy! Sean

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Sean? Do you mind if I reclassify this as a How-To?

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Not a bit. Just thought it was rather short for a how-to.

Sean

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Here's a list for link rel values the Navigation bar uses (as of Mozilla 1.7.5, en-US): # top (1) # up (1) # first (1) # prev (1) # next (1) # last (1) # toc (1) # chapter # section # subsection # appendix # glossary (1) # index (1) # help (1) # search (1) # author (1) # copyright (1) # bookmark # alternate # meta

There are also several "aliases" it will use. It's all in the XUL and JS source, and doesn't require much digging to find. (The aliases are a switch statement in JS, the rel values are IDs of XUL elements.)

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Cool! Thanks for the info.

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