Operation Manual

Working with Hyperlinks and Interactivity 63
As with HTML, WebPlus inserts a marker into your publication at the
site where the code will run. The marker’s dimensions probably won’t
correspond exactly to those of the applet when it’s running, so plan
your page layout accordingly, and the more preview tests you can run
(using various versions of different browsers), the better.
Design Tips
In this section, we’ll look more closely at how linking elements can
help your site succeed both aesthetically and functionally. The
difference is in the details.
Hyperlinks
The World Wide Web has finally popularized the concept of hypertext,
which has been around for at least a decade. Formerly limited pretty
much to clicking our way through CD-ROMs, we’re now accustomed
to clicking ’round the world in a matter of seconds! Yet the skill of
authoring effective hypertext documents is still not widespread. Here
are several style tips for linking:
♦ Use links in text sparingly: quality, not quantity, matters. If you
want readers to finish reading your paragraph, don’t fill it full of
invitations to jump elsewhere.
♦ Don’t let links in text disrupt the flow of your writing. Avoid
sentences like: “Click here
to learn more about placing links in
text.” An improvement would be: “Web links are powerful, but
may cause problems
if overused.”
♦ If you have more than a couple of links to related material,
consider listing them separately (like a See Also list), perhaps with
a bit of graphic embellishment.
♦ If your site has a group of interrelated topics, it may be more
efficient to cluster them into a section or sub-section, with its own
menu page, rather than creating lots of sideways links between the
topics themselves.
♦ For sequential material, you can create a browse sequence (see
below).