cmSiteNavigation toolbar

The cmSiteNavigation toolbar is an extension for the Firefox web browser. It displays the related web pages of the current web page in a toolbar like Mozilla Suite or SeaMonkey do. But the cmSiteNavigation toolbar shows the information in a different way.

Features

• The toolbar provides access to links of type home, top, contents, ToC, index, glossary, directory, up, first, start, prev, previous, next, last, section, subsection, chapter, bookmark, appendix, alternate, author, made, editor, publisher, copyright, help and search. Cause Firefox handles RSS feeds itself, the cmSiteNavigation toolbar ignores links of type "alternate" that are RSS feeds.
• You can see immediately if a web page provides for example sections, chapters, bookmarks or appendices, cause these link types are represented via separate buttons.
• It reads the description text, the author of a web page has entered, of the related web pages and displays it on the toolbar buttons. That way the toolbar is adjusted for the current web page.
• 
  The language and media information of linked pages can be shown.
• English, German, French, Italian and Finnish language versions are available. The appropriate language will be selected depending on which language version of Firefox you use.
• The cmSiteNavigation toolbar is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.

Toolbar buttons

The first button block of the toolbar lets you access the homepage and the different kind of directories like table of contents, index and glossary.

The next block contains buttons to navigate one level up and to the first, previous, next and last page.

The third group of buttons provides access to sections, subsections, chapters, bookmarks and appendices.

The last block contains a button to access alternate versions of the web page, for example a version for printing or other language versions of the web page.

This group also contains an Infos button that provides access to the author, copyright, help and search web pages.

Configuration

The toolbar can be configured at the usual location (Tools-> Extensions-> (mark the cmSiteNavigation-Extension)-> click Settings).

You can configure whether the description text, the autor of a web page has entered, should be displayed on the toolbar buttons. And if yes, whether it should be croped and at what position. This is recommended, cause if the text is too long, the buttons get very wide and push the other buttons out of the view. But the width, at which the text is cropped, can be configured, so if you have a big screen, you can set this value higher. Also you can configure that buttons, for which no information is available, will hide. This can save space, but than the position at where the buttons are varies from web page to web page, and this can get confusing. Additionaly there is an option to hide the whole toolbar, if no information is available. With the two options "Show the language of linked pages" and "Show the media for which linked pages are made" you can set, whether language and media information of the linked pages should be shown in menus and tooltips. Media information could be for example "screen", "braille", "print" or "handheld". See Media descriptors for more information.

Some questions and answers

Which link type is mapped to which toolbar button?

Why is the link type "start" not mapped to the homepage button?

Some websites seem to use the link type "start" for the homepage. But cmSiteNavigation maps it to the first-button. The only link type, that is mapped to the homepage button is "home", and as of version 0.8 "top".

This is cause the description of the link type "start" by the W3C says that it refers to the first document in a collection of documents. And I understand this like a linear slideshow in which the first slide is referenced via the "start" link type.

System requirements

• Mozilla Firefox Version 1.5 - 2.0. It was tested with the Linux and Windows versions 1.5.0.7 and 2.0rc3. It should also work on MacOS.
• Some web sites, that provide information on related web pages.

Change log

0.5 (10.5.2005)

Initial public release

0.6 (10.9.2005)

• An option to hide the whole toolbar, if no information is available. It's turned off by default.
• Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 compatible.
• The content type "text/xml" will now be recognized as a RSS feed.
• Mouse handling improvements on menus. You can now click on a toolbar button move the mouse to a menu item and release the mouse button to activate the menu item. Before, you had to click again on the menu item.
• An URL is now decoded, before it is shown.
• If a new window is opened with the option "toolbar=no", the toolbar is now hidden.
• In Firefox 1.5 the toolbar was not updated if the user navigated back or forward.
• Some menus stayed open, if the user clicked on a menu item with the middle mouse button.
• Minor bugfixes

0.7 (5.11.2005)

• Two new options added to show the language and media of a linked page.
• The toolbar is now updated earlier. Previously, the toolbar was updated, when a page was completely loaded. Now it's updated when the first link is found in the web page.
• Special handling for images in links added. It reads now the alternative text or the title text of an image.
• Link types written in different cases are now recognized.
• Firefox 1.5 compatible.

0.8 (21.10.2006)

New Features

• Nearly completely rewritten under the hood with the problems of 0.7 in mind. That where mainly performance problems and code design.
  The new code design in 0.8 opens the door for some great features like custom toolbar layouts, that probably come with version 0.9.
• en-US is now the default language
• New locale fr-FR. (Thanks to Guillaume Avez)
• New locale it-IT. (Thanks to Dario Zanotti)
• New locale fi-FI. (Thanks to Timo Kankare)
• More menu-like behavior. If you open a menu and move the mouse to an other, the other pops up. You don't need to click again.
• Toolbar buttons and menu items now have a context menu as links in web pages where you can open the link in a new tab or new window, add bookmark, save link target, send link and copy link location.
• Additional to link types specified by the "rel" attribute, the attribute "rev" for back references is now supported. Back references are indicated by a back arrow in menus.
• Multiple link types in rel and rev attributes are now supported.
• New link type support for top, made, editor, publisher and Microformats directory.
• The target attribute of a link is now noticed.
• Firefox 2.0 compatible.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a potential security issue with the opening of links. It was checked whether the current document is allowed to open a link and not the document, from which the link came. So if someone had managed to change the current webpage A to an other webpage B, without changing the links in to toolbar, the links from webpage A could had opened uris only allowed from webpage B. E.g. if you allowed webpage B to open file:// links, a link from page A could had to do this also.

  But cause the pages you trust, need to be known by the attacker and its is very difficult, to achieve this constellation, I consider this not critical. However, I recommend to update nevertheless.

• The extension now plays better together with other themes than the default.

Thanks

Thanks to Stephen Clavering and contributors for developing the Link Toolbar and to Chris Pederick for developing the Web Developer extension. Cause the cmSiteNavigation toolbar was the first extension i wrote for the Firefox web browser, i primarily looked inside these extensions to learn how to write Firefox extensions.

Download

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License version 2 for more details.

Current version is 0.8.

To download the extension go to the Mozilla Update site.

Or download it from here.

Feedback

Please send feedback to "chris at christophm.de"

Found Bugs or have wishes?

You can use the issue tracker for reporting bugs or wishes.