Deconstructing the Navigation Bar

I was talking to respected member of the community the other day and he asked where our old VRML navigation bar went. "It's such a great idea," he said. "Everyone is talking about using VRML for interfaces, but there are so few people doing it."

Well, I told him that it went the way of the dodo (except it's still around for now in the archived articles). Why? Because even though we got some praise for it, our readers mostly complained.

You see, we learned that in order to reach our maximum audience, we can't require that our reader use VRML because the majority of the Net can't/isn't using it yet. We also learned that the normal Joe or Josephine User hates frames and doesn't have a firm grasp on hypertext. Don't worry if you're not suprised by my saying this. You're not supposed to be.

So here we are starting our version of the dumbing down of the Net. We have taken the paper paradigm and applied it to our site. In this issue, you'll be able access the table of contents at any time, but otherwise, you can just press the arrow button to go to the next page as if you were turning pages in a printed magazine.

These days, it is easy to bash a paradigm because it is based in print. But some paradigms serve as a transition to the next. Most of the first novels were written as a series of letters or journal entries. This worked for the people in the 16th century because it was a paradigm they could understand. Much later, like 75 to 100 years, authors broke out of the mold.

In this case, maybe we have to let our users catch up to the times before we go rushing ahead to apply the latest breakthrough in communications. Maybe we just have to make the medium simulate something the public is already familiar with. Yeah, it's boring but it pays the bills.

John Gluck -- Editor