What are we facing?
You want a navigation bar that degrades gracefully on text based browsers. You will also want to have a navigation bar constructed with the correct elements to express the closest semantics to a “Navigation Bar”.
The Solution
The most currently recommended way to express Navigation Bars is using list elements. Semantically, navigation bars are simple lists of links to interest points of the site, that is, is just one dimension, it doesn’t justify the use of table elements. Tables are meant for data tabulation. Besides, tables are not friendly with text based browsers.
If you take a look at the source of this site’s Navigation Bar you will see something like:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.aggiorno.com/default.aspx">home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.aggiorno.com/about-aggiorno.aspx">products</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.aggiorno.com/try.aspx">download</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.aggiorno.com/learn.aspx">aggiornings</a></li>
<li><a class="redlink" href="http://www.aggiorno.com/blog">blog</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.aggiorno.com/contact.aspx">contact</a></li>
</ul>
Using CSS magic, you can disable bullets, reveal content for browsers supporting CSS and hide content for those text based browsers.
Some external references
