Part Two: Entering the Universe of Electronic Publishing

Designing an Appropriate Structure for Your Document

Presentation-Based Design

When most people use the term 'design', they have presentation-based design in mind. Presentation-based design proceeds from the assumption that documents are fixed and stable, whether in print or on screen, and will be viewed through exactly the same types of display devices by all readers.

Unfortunately, these assumptions are rarely true in electronic publishing, especially in networked environments such as the Internet, where readers look at documents through a wide variety of display devices, ranging from 21" full-colour monitors to one-inch monochrome LCD cellular phone screens, and can reconfigure fonts, background and foreground colours, etc. at will.

Proprietary formats such as PDFs and CD-ROM based publications in Macromedia Director or similar environments provide a certain amount of stability, but cannot eliminate all of the unknown factors in electronic publication design. Such formats are most useful when presentation is the paramount concern, but an overt reliance on presentation-based criteria and proprietary formatting will drastically limit the accessibility and usability of any electronic publication.

Structural or 'Semantic-Based' Design

Semantic-based design proceeds from the perspective that the structure of an electronic publication should follow from the meaning of the information it contains, rather than from its intended appearance on the page or onscreen.

This document (along with many other Web pages) is an example of information presented semantically. Markup languages such as HTML and XML are ideal environments for semantic-based design, because they identify the internal elements of a document's structure, regardless of the appearance of those elements. This means that it is not only possible to search semantic-based documents more efficiently (for all subheadings of a particular type, say), but also that it's possible to use style sheets or other types of scripting to adapt semantic-based documents for many different kinds of display environments. It's also possible to add new types of information to existing documents with relative ease.

Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group is a world-renowned expert on the subject of Web usability in general and semantic-based design in particular. His Web site contains much valuable information on the subject, including information about his milestone book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 2000).

Usable Web is a collection of links about information architecture, human factors, user interface issues, and usable design specific to the World Wide Web.

Microsoft's guidelines for improving Web Site usability and appeal are also worth a look.