3 . 7 On-line View
The increasing use of the Web has moved the once highly specialized field of on-line documents into ordinary computing practice. The design of a document and its delivery are becoming more intertwined with the use of the Web as a principal medium for information dissemination.
In the design of a document for print, information is often constructed and organized around reasonable chunks of information, chapters, sections, subsections, and pages. The on-line form of a document also has these types of units, but the organization must take into account factors such as the bandwidth of communications and the speed of displays. In general, one could say it is "better" to break a large document into a bunch of little ones for on-line viewing. It's very annoying to come upon 20-30 page documents that have been moved onto the Web as a single file. The browser spends costly time sucking up the whole document, and programs tend to crash even more than usual under the load.
The key difference between on-line and paper documents is the issue of interaction, the user interface. A Web browser used often provides a well understood interface. The documents, however, must also be organized to take advantage of the interactivity without distracting the user.
The Web is in some sense in the same evolutionary state that WYSIWYG document systems were 10 years ago. The Mac provided a nice user interface with lots of nice fonts; and it encouraged "by God if I've got those fonts I'm going to use `em" attitudes. The features offered by Web browser vendors are compelling and cry to be used. But they tempt, like the Sirens, and lead to clutter, obfuscation, and poor usability.
The problem is that most people are clueless about graphic design, layout, and typography, and it shows. A document with 15 different fonts, all on one page, is cluttered, noisy, and distracting, and the surface finish overpowers the message intended by the author.
In early 1996, Netscape changed its clean home page to one which used a series of "Frames" and Java generated activity. These frames forced the user to change from the familiar "back" button to use the mouse "back frame" selection. In addition, the performance was significantly worse, partially due to Java, but mostly due to the drawing and redrawing of the content in the frames. The graphic and user interface design was very good and cleanly laid out, however, the other problems overwhelmed the benefits (in this author's opinion). It was clearly a case of feature-driven design. Netscape was going to show off the capabilities and damn the consequences. After less than a month of the new frame-based design, they reverted to the older non-frame based design as the default, and let the user turn on the new design if selected, a much better migration path.
Netscape's frame-based home page design
Web authors are currently intoxicated with the growing list of features. Tables, frames, Java, and VRML are all useful technologies when used in moderation and used for a purpose. The use of technological features for the sake of using features has led to many ugly Web pages. Restraint is the best rule of thumb.
