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Thoughts on Web style

I advocate a stylistic approach I call 'chase'-down design:

Start by cutting to the chase!
Give the reader an extremely concise summary, on the first page, where each point, as it's made, offers a link to a more-detailed treatment.

(The traditional view considers that the top level should be the most abstract, but I'd suggest a better goal is to make it the most concise, compact, condensed, concentrated...)

One stylistic problem in hypertext on the Web might be called the 'water torture' fallacy: breaking a document up into very short 'pages' will cause readers to tear their hair out when the Net is slow.

Example: The Yale style manual (This is no worse than most, it just happened to be the one I was reading when the water-torture metaphor occured to me... ;^/

(Far, far worse is the 'stairmaster' fallacy, where between paragraphs the reader has to run upstairs to the overview, and then back down!)

Here's two tables of contents that ought to be broken down into smaller chunks:

Engines for Education by Roger Schank

Principia Cybernetica by several authors

Your tax dollars at work:

Turn images on, don protective eyewear

Here's some resources on hypertext design:

What is good hypertext writing? by Jutta Degener (Germany), who has a high-content site called the boggle reaction Nicely designed solutions to several genuine problems. (The massive tables of contents, above, could use 'stretch lists'.)

A cute little demo of an interactive-outliner design which is missing the 'Up' link to Don Hopkins' incredibly high-content Home Page (Don't overlook the ARPAnet map, which should be explored with images on full!)

A detailed review of hypertext theory

The latest from Ted Nelson/Xanadu and their <gopher site in Australia>

Peter Mueller's guide to hypertext design (which I disagree with a lot of)

A nicely laid out site

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