Visual cues for local and global coherence in the WWW

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
He user of a hypermedia publication needs to be supported in two interrelated tasks: local and global navigation. Local navigation involves following hypertext connections between pairs of specific nodes. Global navigation involves movements within a collection of information that spans many nodes. Local and global navigation are directly related to the underlying concepts of local and global coherence, as defined in the article by Thüring et al. in this issue. To maintain a user's sense of orientation and facilitate navigation, the designer of a hypermedia publication must support both at the visual level. The World-Wide Web (WWW), while providing a simple and effective form of creating and displaying links between nodes, challenges the author/designer to present any global context at all. There is no way to distinguish between local and global link structures in HTML, the markup language used to create WWW docu- ments. The WWW browser provides three pieces of orientation information: (a) the title of the current document; (b) the Uni- versal Resource Loca- tor (URL) of the current document; and (c) the URL of a link destination. None of

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: