Re: Proposed improvements to the mailing lists archives

At 07:06 PM 2002-03-27 , David Booth wrote:
>
>I agree that more than one hierarchy could be used to navigate the list 
>archives in various different ways.  But I don't think this means that we 
>shouldn't have ANY hierarchical navigation system.  To my mind, *ANY* 
>hierarchical navigation bar would be better than NONE.  Just looking at the 
>URL, it looks very much like a hierarchy that is organized:
>

Let me try to simmer down a little and explain the central HCI point, here.

I frequently repeat the following little war dance, by the way:

Listen, listen, listen; to Tim Berners-Lee
He *The Man* who made The Web; It's a Graph, not a Tree

Be that as it may, it's easy for us mathematicians who know the difference to get carried away with this freedom -- and that leads straight to, you know what?  Lost visitors.  Can't make head or tail of where they are or what they need to do to get where they are going.  That is the first thing that happened on the Web and people quick ran out and invented sites with a hierarchical mnemonic structure.

SO, it is very important in designing a graph of resources for the Web, to tease out of the subject matter and focus groups and what have you the _most memorable_ aspects that distinguish one resource of the content from another, and flow those into a _spanning subgraph_ of the graph of all hyperlinks that connect these resources _in the form of a tree_ and present it to the visitor (in the way these links are presented in the pages) as something that walks like a tree, and quacks like a tree.

We need to milk anything that will feel natural to the user in terms of orderly flow of pages to glue together their orientation for navigation around the site.  So the choice of properties and relationships to make the tree-index primary key of pages on the site is important, and should be reflected in the paths in the URLs.  Since this choice has been made, until we reflow the URL paths, stick to the naturally fitting tree view (yes there are bindings to other tree views, but forgetAboutIt about them).

Al

Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 22:34:53 UTC