Pls can I pick your brains on navigation? I am rebuilding the Bricks & Brass menu. Because there are so many pages, the menu (at upto 4 levels deep) has become too big. The plan is to have separate menus from the main areas of the site (eg with tabs on the page), and then have upto 4 levels within that.

At the moment, for each page I show (if appropriate):
- all level 0 (ie the root pages)
- the children of the page
- the brothers of the page
- the uncles of the page (including the parent)
- the grandparent of the page (*not great uncles*)

I am wondering whether to include the uncles. (No sexism intended!)

The attached example (one page of html and a css file) shows 'Removing Pointing' as the target page:
1. the existing menu, showing the huge size, but with uncles such as 'Roof' and 'Internal Walls'
2. new non-uncle version
3. new non-uncle version for the next level down

In the non-uncle versions, to get to 'Roof' you would have to click either on 'DIY Element' (to get it as a child) or 'Exterior Walls' (to get it as a brother).

What do you think? Should I include uncles, great-uncles, great-great-uncles, or none at all? Many thanks...

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A bit of background... To cut a long story short, I manage the site navigation in a local Access database; each page is assigned a parent page and a sequence in that 'twig'. I then generate the menu for each page and poke that into a MySQL table. When a visitor asks for a page, the page calls a PHP script which gets the menu for the page and presents it to the visitor. The advantages of this are 1. it is easy to keep navigation on such a large site consistent and accurate, 2. no DHTML etc.

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