Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number 5,933,841. Here's the abstract:

A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.

Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle's Cyberspace
posted by DragonBoy on Jan 21, 2003 - 47 comments

Gov Agency creates bare-bones web index Web sites assume that you know a little about what you're looking for. One US Federal agency has created a navigation engine that requires virtually no understanding of anything.

I'm torn. Part of me wants one of these navigation tools for every website I use. Part of me is a little disappointed that sites have to be this least-common-denominator-simple for people to use.

Do you like it? Would you want one for the sites you use? Discuss.
posted by basilwhite on Oct 25, 2001 - 14 comments

Whoa! Amazon.com's added a new tab to it's menubar. And it's got MY name on it!
posted by Taken Outtacontext on Sep 26, 2001 - 46 comments

So tabs are considered a bad idea when it comes to designing navigation. What's better and where can it be found? Who has developed the best navigation system to be found on the Internet?
posted by Brilliantcrank on Sep 21, 2000 - 3 comments

These sliding menus may not be anything much to you design mavens out there, but to a simple engineer/management consultant like myself, they are addictively neat. Whenever I check out the site, I find myself pulling them out and playing with them while deciding where to go in the site. How'd they do that?
posted by fpatrick on Jul 28, 2000 - 9 comments