Chromed Site Menu

One aspect of website development that has been redesigned over and over again is navigation. As time has progressed, web designers have battled multiple issues – usability, accessbility, client preferences (I want it look just like Amazon’s), tradition (other sites do it “this way”), cool factors. But what if you the designer never had to design another navigation? How cool would that be? Very, you say?! That’s what I thought.

In short, my idea is to put your website menu in the browser chrome. The browser chrome, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “a euphemism for the graphic control elements of your browser interface.” It would work like this: The webdesigner would create an XML file in the root of the website called ‘sitemenu.xml’. The browser knows to where to look for the sitemenu.xml. It finds the xml file, parses it, and generates the nodes in the toolbar menu under ‘Site’. The toolbar menu is the same one that has File, Edit, and Bookmarks. So this means that the contents of the Site menu are dependent upon the website in the browser window.
Why would we want to do that? you might ask. Well, there are several reasons:

1. Web Designers would spend their valuable time on other aspects of the site
2. Accessibility would become a non-issue:
   • Anyone using a screen reader already knows how to use there application menus.
   • Usability is increased since the user doesn’t need to relearn the navigation style for that website
3. There’s now more room for the content without the navigation consuming space on the page.
   • Reduced Page Size – A good thing for the mobile environment, since currently subscribers have to pay for the data charges.
   • Can be cached for browsing multiple pages on the same site.
4. It would work identically on your mobile browser as it does on your desktop

Can this actually work, you say? Sure! Why not? All the pieces are available. Google already uses a similar idea for crawling your site. Browsers are already doing something similar with a favicon (the image that shows up when you bookmark a site). There are challenges ahead, to be sure. The biggest one is browser adoption. Theoretically, I could create the optimal XML file and associated DTD, give it to Opera and Mozilla, and they’d have it implemented in a fortnight or two. However, Microsoft would probably get around to it with IE9 because between this day and that, they would create a slightly different implementation that they would force upon the development community. Then there’s the mobile browser manufacturers. The fragmentation in the mobile community is great. With the numerous mobile browser manufacturers out there , It could take years for them all to catch up. Like I said before – there are challenges ahead. However, I still think it can work.