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2.5 Examples of signal
design
Reference links from the text should not
immediately take the reader outside the document.
Exemplary in this is the web site version of Wakefield
(1997), which is designed so that one may click on
references within the main text and view those
references, annotated, in a sidebar without leaving the
main text, in fact without leaving one's place in the
main text. Unfortunately, the references and the main
text do not move independently, so by clicking on a
reference in the main text, the reader is taken to the
reference, but taken away from the spot in the text being
read.
Berners-Lee
(1998) should be a good example of signalling text
structure in hypertext, given that it is a piece of a
broad proposal for standards in web text format. This is
not the case however. The index page of the site is a
hot-linked table of contents, but the individual pages
(see fig. 2) of the site give no information as to their
position in the overall document. Another example of this
limbo type of pages is Mobil Oil's web site
(www.mobil.com)., which contains a useful, well
illustrated multi-page discussion of greenhouse gases and
global warming, unnecessarily difficult for the NN reader
because of lack of structure signalling.
Good examples of text structure signalling can be
found in a not so surprising web site. ThinkQuest
is a student web site construction competition, and many
of the examples of student work have good structure
signalling. For example, one site devoted to philosophy
(see fig. 3) is Stilman
et al. (1998). When the user selects a topic, a new
window opens, showing the directory. Selection of a topic
from the directory opens a content window; the user can
rearrange the desktop to place these two small windows so
that both content and index are visible.
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