The broader issues

The Web evolved from Internet culture and, as a medium, has its own quite distinct characteristics. Most importantly, the decision to view or to ignore an item is totally within the user's control. Resources can only be actively selected. Users may select or follow a link to your pages, but if they find nothing of interest they will quickly move on. The author or designer of a document only has a limited degree of control over how that document will appear to each individual user. This point cannot be stressed too strongly. The final appearance of documents is largely determined by the browser program used. The choice of browser is in the hands of individual users; there are many different browsers and all browsers are configurable, which affects the style of document display. Most browsers are used in a windowing environment, which allows the user to change the size of the browser window, causing the text line length to alter. Users may also disable the automatic retrieval of in-line images in order to reduce the time taken to fetch and display documents. Some authors go to great lengths in an effort to increase the amount of control they have over the final appearance of their documents, generally with limited success. The end results usually appear better to a higher proportion of users when authors accept the limitations of the Web.

The medium differs both from the printed page and from television, and the most effective Web documents are designed accordingly rather than being lifted straight from another medium. Laid out as a set of nodes rather than pages, they tend to be non-linear in style, with concise text and links to more detailed background information. The graphics element is important but is best kept to a minimum, as documents that are delivered over a public network may need to be kept quite small due to bandwidth considerations. A significant proportion of the material published is of an ephemeral nature, being dynamically generated in response to user queries.

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[ITCP] 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.