Some Observations on Composing on the Web
As you compose documents for the Web, you soon discover that
you can't write as you would for the printed page.
With the Web, you allow the reader random access to your information.
You tend to structure the information in discrete modules.
You are creating a museum exhibit, a selection of interesting items.
In contrast, when
composing a paper or delivering a lecture, you are presenting information
in serial form. Your audience must follow
your path through the material; they can't skip around. More knowledgeable
people are bored; less knowledgeable people are confused.
Advantages of the Web
- Great potential for communicating and educating, especially in
technical fields. You can create
supplementary documents to which interested readers can jump;
more knowledgeable readers can ignore them.
- Very helpful in structuring information. You try a new structure,
see how it works, then try another.
- Easier to edit. You can jump from one section to another with a click
of the mouse. Also, since the text is more compressed than in normal
typewritten papers, you can see more of the text at one time.
- A wonderful tool for keeping track of notes. You can create temporary
links to your notes, so you can consult them with a click of
the mouse. Incidentally, you can link to a plain ASCII file; it
doesn't have to be in HTML (just don't give such a file the extension .html
or .htm).
- Satisfying to see your work displayed in attractive fonts
immediately after you have written it.
- Possible to incorporate figures and other sorts of data.
- Though I haven't done it with this projecti, it is possible to
incorporate interaction with the reader.
Disadvantages of the Web
- Requires a new infrastructure: computer accounts, network connections,
and in some cases modems.
- Often involves fiddling with details such as scanners,
drawing programs, and file ownership.
It's easy to waste time on technical problems that are irrelevant to the
subject matter, for example, what color the background should be.
- Raises problems of copyright since it is so easy to copy text and
figures and make them available over the Web.
- People without access to the Web can't see your work directly. However, you
can make a printout.
- Requires re-thinking the conventions of academic papers.
- Least useful for long, sequential trains of thought. I'd rather
print out such writing and save my eyes. I find that I can
concentrate better away from the computer.
Spanish on the Web
One problem I encountered was how to represent the
accented vowels and tildes of written Spanish. There is a roundabout
solution.
Where you want one of these non-English characters, use a coded
character. For example, if you enter this code in your text:
ñ
The Web document will display:
ñ
Some useful codes for Spanish:
á Small a, acute accent
é Small e, acute accent
í Small i, acute accent
ñ Small n, tilde
ó Small o, acute accent
ú Small u, acute accent
You can see a complete list of character codes at the URL:
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_13.html#SEC106
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