Dynamic Page Elements-Cloak and Dagger Web Design - Enhanced Internal Navigation
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Scripting is often used to enhance "internal navigation" - a list of links pointing to anchors inside the same document. We can use scripting to hide content parts and show them when the user clicks the link, thus avoiding a long scrolling page. Effectively, we are simulating a site navigation in one document, which creates other problems:
1. Changing user behaviour patterns
As mentioned earlier, a wrong jump in a simulated paged navigation like this might make the user try to go back via the back button or the appropriate keyboard shortcut. This will initialise - hide all elements, and show the first one - not the last one the user has chosen. There is not much we can do about that except for making the user aware that this is not a "site inside one document".
2. Disallowing bookmarking and direct linking
User won't be able to bookmark a certain section of the document, and some browsers do not change the state of the links to visited once you jumped to this section. A good scripting solution should allow the user to directly jump in the page by supplying the anchor in the URL:
http://www.foo.org/index.html#bar
Furthermore, we could trace the clicks and set a cookie to show the last section when the user visits the page again.
3. Jumpy display
Unless we show and hide the element via including it or not on the backend, there will be a brief moment when the element is visible before it gets hidden. This is nothing serious, but can be annoying.
4. Cutting off content
By hiding different content sections and showing them onclick we make it easier to read the document on the screen. Some users, however, may want to print out or see the whole document. We should give them an option to do so.
Next: Conclusion and Notes >>
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