Neither the holy scrollers nor the card sharks are necessarily right with regard to hypertext design. It depends on the performance problem, the performers, etc.
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People get a sinking feeling each time they jump to a web site and find themselves waiting for the page to load - not because of graphics, but because of the length of the document. Fear and loathing are symbolized by the long scroll bar; because they hit STOP and move on. Developers of such pages are the Holy Scrollers. They develop or convert large quantities of text as single scrolling entities while missing important usability principles. The Holy Scrollers hang on to the artifact of scrolling - a traditional means of accessing text on a computer - but confuse it with hypertext, where restructuring, "chunking," semantic encoding, and wayfinding maps must be present if value is to be added. |
The Holy Scrollers
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"Traditional text is extremely heterogeneous as can be seen by comparing a mystery novel with a corporate annual report. You do not need actually to read the text to distinguish between the two. But the same two texts would have looked exactly the same if they had been presented on-line .... "
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On the other hand, the Card Sharks are those insisting that only a single "screen" or node of text is ever appropriate
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