Structure signalling in text documents leans
heavily on the fact that text is linear in structure. For
example, a cause-effect relation between two
sentences,two paragraphs or two adjacent sections is
easily signalled in text. In hypertext there is no easy
way to signal the same relationship between two "pages".
This is often seen in web sites which are cut and paste
versions or an original linear text.
This weakness in much of hypertext is temporary,
reflecting the embryonic nature of design for the medium.
Moreover, with web page frames and the ease of
incorporation of navigation aids and visual and textual
links into web documents, hypertext can be designed so
that the reader is supported to the point where she/he is
always informed of a page's position in the overall
structure of the text, and of the page's information
relationship to other pages in the document.
Structure signalling strategy
For any local piece of text (the text on one web
page), there are four kinds of structure signals which
afford structure related support to the reader:
1. Signalling the text's position in the overall
document structure
2. Signalling the text's position in the local
knowledge structure
3. Signalling the text's internal text structure
4. Signalling the text's internal knowledge
structure
Not all of these signallings are appropriate or
necessary all of the time; rather each type of signalling
should be used when there is some clarifying benefit.