Soon after I upgraded to Opera 7.1, a toolbar began appearing for certain sites. Intrigued, I viewed the source of one of the sites and saw <link> tags that correlated with the buttons on the toolbar. I proceeded to add the tags to my site and shazam, the toolbar appeared. I then added <link> tags to my photos pages to make them easier to navigate. All it took was adding the following two lines:

I had no idea that the tag could be used for anything other than style sheets, but I discovered that the link element has many uses. The W3C has a complete list of available types.

Mark talked about them in day 9 of 30 days to accessibility and even included instructions for adding them to Movable Type templates but I wasn’t paying attention that day. I have since added them to my individual and monthly archive templates.

Here are instructions to enable the navigation bar for a few different browsers.

Opera 7 (Windows or Linux): It’s called the “Navigation bar” and on the menu you go to View -> Navigation bar -> Auto. Opera 7’s fast forward feature also takes advantage of relationship links.

Mozilla 1.x (Windows or Linux): It’s called the “Site Navigation Bar” and on the menu you go to View -> Show/Hide -> Site Navigation Toolbar -> Show Only As Needed.

Internet Explorer 6.0: I didn’t find any mention of a navigation bar but I would imagine it will be added eventually.