Ahh, yes.  I find those kinds of organizations faintly frustrating,
myself, even when ethernet is available.  Despite all the links, they
are still a bit of a pain to browse around.  If it's going to have
that huge table of contents in the front, the whole document may as
well be sent as a single HTML file.

A better scheme might be an abbreviated table of contents, with just
the section headings.  Then you can still browse pretty quickly....

This all seems like a situation of bad layout despite good
intentions.  The only thing that leeps out as a bad point of HTML
design, is that once you get to one of the sub-pages, your browser
loses all concept that that page you are viewing is just one part of a 
larger document.

It would be nice, for instance, to be able to get to the end of a
"page", and keep scrolling on down to the next page.  With better
meta-information, the browser could do things like that without making
you wait for the download.  It could keep enough of the larger
document in cache that you can scroll several pages without having to
hit hte network.  But there is no serious notion of multi-page
constructs in HTML today.  Even one of the simplest of such
constructs, a linear sequence akin to the pages of a book, is not
available.


Lex




William Barnett-Lewis writes:
 > Just as an FYI, the book analogy comes from sitting on the wrong end of
 > a 14.4 modem and having a TOC page and then having to link out to each
 > "chapter" and the ensuing wait. The saddest part of it is that it isn't
 > much better these days with a T1 here at work. Most of the time I simply
 > end up printing everything out because it's too annoying to try and read
 > the document on-line. (and don't even get me started on html "Help" or
 > "Documentation"... grrrr)
 > 
 > W.  
 > 
 > Lex Spoon wrote:
 > (snip)
 > >  > The biggest problem is that the whole web paradigm is such a poor way of
 > >  > navigating through information in the first place. Using a web browser
 > >  > is much like having to read a book by owning a whole copy of the book
 > >  > for each page; you read the first page in the first book, then set it
 > >  > down and pick up the next copy to read the second page, and so on. HTML
 > >  > was designed to provide static text; nothing more.
 > > 
 > > Could you explain this?  Many web pages DO have a nice layout of
 > > textual information, and it seems to work pretty well.  What are the
 > > kinds of pages you think are the worst?  I've got my ideas, but you
 > > seem to have something more general in mind....
 > (more snippage) 
 > > Lex
 > 
 > -- 
 > Live without fear; your Creator loves you       
 > as a mother. Go in peace to follow the good	    
 > road and may God's blessing be with you always. 
 > St. Claire