Web navigation (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s article on web navigation — the process of moving through a site’s hypertext/hypermedia via a browser. Covers a brief history (the Web’s 1989 origin, growth through mobile/smartphone adoption) and a short taxonomy of navigation types (hierarchical, global, local, supplemental, and contextual — only the first three are actually defined in any depth). It also gives one-line glossary entries for navigation bar, sitemap, dropdown menu, flyout menu, and named anchor, plus a brief, non-specific note that navigation design lacks universal guidelines because sites vary so much.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- Hierarchical, global, and local navigation are the three types the article actually defines: hierarchical navigation structures a site general-to-specific and, per the article’s own framing, gives “a clear, simple path to all the web pages from anywhere on the website” — a claim that in practice describes what makes hierarchical navigation effective when paired with global navigation (the top-level section list present on every page) more than a property hierarchy has on its own. Local navigation is the in-page links to other pages within the same section. See Navigation Menus.
- Glossary terms, defined in one line each: navigation bar, sitemap, dropdown menu, flyout menu, and named anchor — all covered in more depth in Navigation Menus, Site Map (Navigation Page), and Jump Menus.
- No universal navigation guidelines exist, per the article, because sites differ too much in content, audience, and goals for one fixed set of rules to apply — a hedge rather than a specific finding, but stated plainly enough to be worth noting.