Authoring in the World Wide Web
Writing documents for the Web
requires special author attention,
because of the limited network speed, the lack of overview of the
entire structure of the hyperdocument, and the limited possibilities
for information retrieval.
There is a general
Style
Guide available from the World Wide Web Consortium.
Here is a short list of useful hints for authors:
- Keep the text short. Not only does reading from a computer screen
take
about 30% longer than reading from paper,
retrieving long nodes over the Internet takes more time as well.
- Select meaningful names and titles for nodes.
The name needs to have a meaning in the Web, not just within your
document. Titles like "Chapter 3" are not meaningful.
Every node of this course text has the name of the course text as its title,
not the header describing the subject of just the single node.
- Use meaningful anchors for links. "You can find information on
authoring in the Web here." does not provide
enough information to judge whether the link leads to interesting material
(not for a human reader, and certainly not for a search tool).
A link like "We provide information on authoring
in the Web." does give that information in the anchor.
- When you use imagemaps (clickable images), make sure you also provide
textual links to the same information.
The course pages on the
Dexter model and on the
Trellis model are good
examples.
- Avoid unnecessary and large images.
Pictures are often only useful if they say more than a thousand words, because
retrieving them takes more time than retrieving a thousand words.
Often small (iconic) images with links to the full-size image work well:
from the icon the user can decide whether it is worth waiting for the
large image to load.
- Use shape, not color to indicate points of interest in images.
There are still users with monochrome displays.
A blue rectangle and a red rectangle may look an identical shade of grey
on such a display, meaning that the user cannot see which of the rectangles
is the desired link anchor.
- Warn the user when a link leads to a large node, like this
740 Kbyte mpeg file.
- Make sure that servers and directories have a starting page
from which all documents can be reached (directly or indirectly).
When http://machine/b/c/d.html exists then
http://machine/b/c/, http://machine/b/
and http://machine/ should also exist as html files.
- When handling forms or imagemaps, make sure that all possible
inputs are handled properly.
Handling all possible inputs is good programming practice in general.
Programming for the Web is no exception.
- Provide information only to the intended audience.
The first PizzaHut site for instance
was an experimental service from the Santa Cruz PizzaHut.
Although it offered its menu to the whole world the Santa Cruz branch
would only deliver in Santa Cruz.
- Make sure the network traffic you expect to generate by offering
your information to the network does not exceed your network service.
You cannot expect a 64kbps line to serve hundreds of simultaneous users
retrieving documents with large inline images.
- Tell people about your information, so they can create links to it.
Several large search engines offer the possibility to notify them of
the existence of new servers or new pages.