Linking to context
A major difference between writing
part of a serial text, and an online
document, is that your readers may
have jumped in from anywhere. Even
though you have only made links to
it from one place, any other person
may want to refer to that particular
point, and will so make a link to
that particular part of your work
from their own. So you can't rely
on your reader having followed your
path through your work.
Of course if you are writing a tutorial,
it will be important to keep the
flow from one document to the next
in the order you intended for its
primary audience. You may not wish
to cater specially for those who
jump in out of the blue, but it is
wise to leave them with enough clues
so as not to be hopelessly lost.
Some ways of doing this are:
- Watch that your text and vocabulary
stands by itself. Starting a document
with "The next thing we we consider
is..." or "The only solution to this
problem is..." will certainly confuse.
- Sometimes the opening words refer
to the context, and can be linked
to background information. For
example, in the WWW project documentation,
the first occurrence of the acronym
WWW is often linked back to the central
project document.
- The navigation hints at the top or
bottom of the document can give explicit
pointers. Examples are at the bottom
of this document.
It can also be useful to imagine
as you are writing that you yourself
may wish to reuse the document. some
day.
Navigational Icons
Icons make great navigational hints.
It is very effective to have the
same consistent icon throughout the
work, always (except on the "top"
page) linked back to the top page.
This kills two birds with one stone:
it gives consistency to the work,
so readers know when they are in
it and when they are outside it,
and it also gives them a quick way
of getting back to the top of it.
You can do the same thing with sections,
so that at the top (or bottom) of
each page you might have a small
string of icons, the first to go
back to the top of the work, the
second to go back to the chapter,
the third to go back to the section
within the chapter, for example.
[This style guide was for a long time empty of icons
because I was editing it
with the old hypertext editor
which doesn't handle images. I may fix that with time -tbl]
(Part of style guide for online hypertext
. Up to Writing each document , on
to Title tag )
Tim BL