You may have noticed that Apple spruced up the website today with some fun new HTML5 animations and a redesigned navigation bar. Personally, I'm not really a fan of the new glossy look of the navigation. Gloss is on its way out in web design and simple gradients are moving in. There's already a parody Twitter account too, but I digress.

Looking back to previous designs of the Apple website, Apple has always attempted to keep the look of the website inline with the UI of the current version of Mac OS X. For instance, if you look at this photo, you can see what the Apple site was like during the releases of Panther and Tiger. Then when Leopard came out with the 3D dock and transition from glossy blues and whites to more smooth grays, Apple changed the website to this. Now we have this black, glossy navigation, which by the way looks strikingly similar to the iTunes store navigation bar in iTunes 9.

This is only a theory, but it's possible that in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion we may see a lot more glossy blacks make their way into the UI of the operating system. There have been rumors that Apple was redesigning certain aspects of Lion. Sure we already saw a preview of Lion in October at the Back to the Mac event, but Lion was in its early stages and isn't due out until this summer. Gloss has always been one of Apple's favorite looks and with the recent apple.com changes, it appears they are going to stick with it. The question remains whether or not glossy blacks will be more prominent in the next release of Mac OS X.