On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 06:30, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:58:13AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Erik wrote:
I feel that it is extremely tedious to have to click around many times and load many pages to get a complete picture of an issue, a person etc.
There is little difference between clicking on a TOC link in a huge article than clicking on a link to another article.
For me there's a huge difference. My latency on wikipedia is usually between 5 and 10 seconds. OTOH I have high bandwidth.
This is an important point. There are people with 28kbps flaky bandwidth in the world. Lots of them.
I of course have a whopping 2 mbps download speed line but that is due to unfair global economics. Further my neighbours do not seem to need wikipedia as much as the places where there are no internet even.
So I would greatly prefer to download a huge article at once.
This helps to be saved on a floppy and be searched effectively (Ctrl+F for most browsers) Printing becomes more meaningful.
I think an article should have as much information related to its title as possible for that reason, and things should only be split off if a certain maximum size is reached (I tend towards 30-40K), or if they are not really related.
again the search utility becomes helpful. Anything very big will easily attract attention and then reorganisation can be thought about. I use tabbed browsing (a great recent trick to keep the number of open windows low) and find myself sometimes getting entangled in anything upto 50 tabs on a decent night.
Monolithic pages should not become a bad thing. Clear strucutre and named anchors can help monolithic pages be very useful.
To me 'standards' that seem to specify file size as a 'usability' issue based on average screen size a misled corporate PR feature.
But eventually I must admit, technology that interchange the data between monolithic and individual nodes an author wishes for will be a useful thing.
Ramanan