Runester

The Halloween Pictures are here!

Yes, I have finally gotten the Halloween pictures from last weeks party, on line. [We may be getting some more soon, they have to be scanned in.] Anyway, check them out and see how much fun we had. Here’s an especially good one of Lisa & I dressed as Christmas Trees! [BTW: The party wasn't really as bright as it looks in those pictures. In fact, it was nice and spookily dark! The camera flash makes everything look much more well lit then it actually was.]

Website navigation rant, Part II

I said a lot, in my last post about the challenge of correctly and thoroughly linking web pages into a coherent navigational structure. This time I’d like to address the reasons this problem even exists.

First, when Tim Berners-Lee first cooked up the web, each HTML page was considered it’s own document. In other words, each website was like a library, and each page was like a book in that library. They were expected to be long (thus the scroll bars at the side of each page) and there was a mechanism for internal navigation (the seldom used anchors, or internal hyperlinks). As originally imagined, the web would be a way for academics to share scholarly papers in a platform independent way (i.e. no special hardware / software combination needed). What’s actually happened with the web, is another matter entirely.

Now, most people view a website as a book, and each HTML document is one page within that book. Pages are, generally, shorter (about one screen full of info), and instead of a few inter-page links and many intra-page links, there are very few intra-page links used at all and dozens of inter-page links. Because the web has become something that it was not designed for, there is no automatic, built-in way to navigate a website … nor is there a universally accepted navigational convention.

Let’s look at some other, similar, media and see how navigation is handled.

Books: There is a “physicallity” (you can touch it and feel how far you’ve gotten in your reading) that offers many cues as to where the reader is; where the beginning is; and where the end is. Books have covers, table of contents (TOC), indexes at the back, page numbers, and sometimes word glossaries. All of these features are “standard” and can be expected to be found in any book, anywhere. Of course, books are many hundreds of years old … so the technology is mature.

Newspapers & Magazines: These are almost the same as books, except that articles are almost never contiguous. Instead, articles are continued on another page, and there is the print equivalent of a hyper link at the bottom of the article - “story continued on page 112.” Again, printed medium is hundreds of years old and people have expectations on how the information is organized and how they are supposed to navigate the instrument.

Websites: With websites, there is no standard navigation scheme. Some people put menus on the top, or the left, or the bottom, or the right side of the page. Some don’t even use a single menu location but bury links within the content of each page. Some pages are whole and self contained, while others are only one of several parts of an article or collection. Some websites are collections of articles, others are more like books, with collections of pages, and still others are more like computer applications with various screens managing inputs and outputs.

The lack of a standard in use, is why there is no standard in design applications. For example, if you write a book using a word processor like MS Word, the program will automatically number all of your pages, generate a table of contents, and even (if you want) generate an index with keywords listed with the pages on which they occur. How did Microsoft know that writers would want these features? Why not assume that books would be read like papyrus scrolls or a collection of index cards? Because book navigation is well established, understood, and commonly expected. Microsoft also makes FrontPage, a website design application. In this application, there are several menu schemes you can select, and the ability to link pages in different topographies is supported, but on single topography is assumed. So, the same company that can safely assume a navigation scheme for books (and build it into their word processing application) can make no such assumption for websites, so has to make several different options available as well as “none of the above” (i.e. full customization).

Interestingly enough, this may be slowly changing. Already, left hand navigation menus along with clear page headers and footers are so common on the web as to be de facto standards. They are certainly not universal, but common enough for even novice users to easily grasp and navigate. Perhaps, like Microsofts FrontPage, this navigation style will become so accepted that most web design tools will come with this feature built in. Then, maintaining a large, fully connected site will be obvious and easy.

Actually, we are no where near that point now. I have seen (and tried) countless web page editors. Even the smartest ones treat each page as if it were a separate island of data. Adding hyperlinks between documents may be push-button-easy but they are never automatically added nor updated. So, even using fancy editors (as opposed to hand editing with NOTEPAD) would not solve the problem of creating a consistent and useful navigation menu. FrontPage seems to do this pretty good, if you don’t mind the $150 price tag and the other crap it puts in the page code. Beyond this, you’d have to buy some big CMS (Content Management System) and build your own templates to have navigation added to your pages.

Maybe this is a good idea for a shareware app? [I call dibs! Don't steal this, or else ...]