Some background to this.

1. # Blocks in general are seen by practically all web designers I've ever met as "old school" and something we should get rid of, or at least deprecate.
2. Many sites hide those blocks in Moodle, indicating they don't like them or find them necessary.
3. Navigating the nav and settings blocks is not particularly nice, even if accessibility work has been done recently. MDL-35590
4. Even without blocks, we still need ways to access the many functions in these blocks.

Over in MDL-51611 the idea came up to use a list on the left to navigate between a "set" of similar pages. Similar navigation is on a lot of other popular sites, like LinkedIn, Google+, ZenDesk and so on.

This issue is to examine the feasibility of using this approach on ALL pages in Moodle, combined with other features, to make the nav and settings blocks obsolete.

Some of the other features we should add at the same time are:

• Adding a single consistent "gear" icon to (the top-right of) every page that has settings
• Adding drop-down menus to the items in the navbar to allow jumps across to other activities, courses, categories
• In activities, add Next and Previous buttons.
• Adding inline editing to every text we can. MDL-51802
• Adding a "zoom" button to toggle all navigation from the page temporarily to focus on content.

I think a lot of this can be done by just displaying the navtree structure in a different way - plugin developers would not have to do anything different.