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Re: Is this Navigation or a Menu? How should it work?

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From: Jeremy Echols
Date: May 9, 2018 10:48AM

I tend to prefer to use the keyboard, and to me that site navigation is annoying. I'm fairly sure it isn't a failure, though - at least not yet.

I find the "it's navigation" claim absurd, personally, because w3c has an example of a "navigation menubar". Just because it's navigation doesn't mean it can't be presented to the user as a menu. The question is really: what are you aiming to achieve? If you want compliance the easiest way possible, you won't implement a menu. If you want to make the navigation easy to use, figure out what makes it easiest for keyboard users. I am obviously only one data point, but for me, I like dropdowns which show a bunch of options to work with up/down arrow keys, close on ESC, etc.

To Glen's point, a menu can be used to perform actions or change the view in a traditional desktop app - I'm not sure why there's a perception that menus don't take you to a different place or show you different information. In the desktop world, hyperlinking to other "documents" is far less common, but a menu can certainly take you from one view to another, or change what you look at. In Firefox, in fact, the History menu allows you to do exactly that.