I agree with Hoffman on this point
rather than with Jakob Nielsen, who promotes short web pages.
Short pages make your finger sore from clicking,
and take far longer to read.
Lists of links, it could be argued, are pretty pointless,
since they represent only one person's idiosyncratic way of structuring the world.
For anyone else, you'd be better off just starting afresh with
Google or Wikipedia.
But I make mine public anyway, partly so I can access them myself from abroad.
The only thing that might make them useful to people other than me
is that I do a lot of annotation of the lists.
I weave them into a narrative,
or organise them into a structure.
I freely edit their titles.
I don't know how anyone expects a hotlist-type bland list of links with their original titles intact
to be useful.
Things that might be nice to do, but life is too short:
ALT tags for images.
Dimensions (width and height) on images.
No image dimensions meant some old browsers would jump to inaccurate location on page
when following
link to a label on a page.
(Exact vertical location of label changes once image loads.)
Browser should be able to deal with this, of course.
The Internet
is as close as we have ever come to the Enlightenment dream of
freedom of the press for everybody.
With WAP, I used to worry that the mobile Internet could develop into
a restricted community like
books, newspapers, radio, TV and cinema,
with mobile users only accessing data from media
"content providers".
I'm not worried about this any more. Anyone who sells such a restricted Internet access
will simply be beaten
in the marketplace by anyone offering full Internet access.
"Anyone who slaps a 'This page is best viewed with Browser X'
label on a Web page appears to
be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a
document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
- Tim Berners-Lee
Ancient Brain
