Webstyle Guide Thoughts

Webstyle Guide rocks! It's very comprehensive and concise. As per my assignment, I'll take three of his sections and apply it to my own website:

(I'll write one element now, and I'll have the other two posted tonight)

1) In the interface design section, he makes a great observation about the difference between print media and web media. Since print is linear and the web isn't, each page has different standards in terms of metadata: what is the page about and where does it belong. In a book, you might have the book title, chapter title, and page number on each page. Since it's contextual and physical, you know who authored a particular page because the book, as a self contained information object, will have that information on or inside the cover. A webpage, according the Webstyle Guide, is a freestanding page: since everything is hyperlinked, metadata and contextual information should be included on everypage. Why on every page? Most people follow links to a page that is, contextually, in the middle of the content set. If there is no metadata included on the page, then the user is at a lost about who, what, where, when a piece of information is written. For my website, I need to put such things as authorship and "Updated XX/XX/XX" so that the user has that metadata on hand. Other metadata, title and contextual, will also be provided via the site navigation and setup. A user would know where they were at in relation to other steps/subjects in my instruction due to the navigational tabs at the bottom of my site, and they title will always appear at the top of every page.