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The structuring of information

Make your top-level documents short, simple and to the point. If you have background information in longer documents that you want to make available, indicate this in the documents that point to them. When people are just browsing they do not want to load large documents that may turn out not to interest them.

Large documents will need to be divided into more manageable nodes. It may be appropriate to have such documents also available in a format, such as PostScript, suitable for downloading and printing.

Give your documents meaningful titles that give good clues to their content. If the document is not completely self-contained, try to give some indication of its context as well. If it is part of a larger document or series of documents, you may think the context is obvious, but any document you publish on the Web may subsequently have links created to it by other Web users. Someone following such a link may arrive at it via a completely unpredictable route and be unaware of its original context.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.