Escher effects in on-line text

• From: Harvey Bingham <hbingham@acm.org>
• Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 23:21:09 -0400
• To: <w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20000703104218.00aefb90@pop.tiac.net>

Good treatment of effects, sometimes unintended, of concise writing style:

"Escher effects in on-line text" by Judith Ramey. In "The Society of Text. 
Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information",
Edward Barrett, editor. The MIT Press, 1988.

Abstract: Escher effects are ambiguities or other anomalies in on-line text
that force the reader to study the text as text. On-line text consists of
instrumental text (commands, menu items) and commentary (system messages,
Help). Simple Escher effects result from stylistic strategies used to
compress on-line text, tangles of instrumental text and commentary,
weak-formatting, and home-grown terminology. Complex Escher effects
result from deeper rhetorical or structural problems; they interfere
with our ability to build a rhetorical contract with the writer/designer
and our ability to build a useful mental model of the system.

Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Tuesday, 4 July 2000 23:33:15 UTC