Quote:
Originally Posted by phillipgessert
I think you made a point that you would know to click because you know it's an HTML/hypertext doc.
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But here again lies a possible conflation that leads down a path to problems of one's own making. What is meant by a "HTML/hypertext doc". I can be guilty of informally using such ambiguous/incoherent terms myself when not being careful.
Hypertext is an abstract conceptual description of documents. I won't get any more detailed than that admittedly vague description, but it will suffice for our purposes here. Formally, hypertext is really a kind of algebra (or "general relational system" if you prefer).
Hypertext can be implemented (and has been) in any number of ways -- only one of which is via HTML. For example, before there was HTML there was (even yuckier than HTML) SGML. And as another example, for decades SAS institute used it's own markup language (called, if I remember correctly) SAS Markup Languag (SML). And IBM had several markup languages floating around in the pre-Bookmanager and book manager era. You young-uns don't know what it was like. There were range wars. Check the old usenet archives. It was nasty.
And creating and using a hypertext document/system doesn't even require a markup language. It can be (and has been) done purely programmatically, or via a DB. The world, in fact, is fairly overrun with actual and potential IMPLEMENTATIONS of hypertext.
HTML is ONE of those implementation mechanisms.
So what does the reader of a hypertext document need to know about HTML in order to understand or suspect how to navigate such a document? Well, NOTHING -- and often they don't. Believe me, my sister has NO idea of HTML, NO idea of the theoretical framework of hypertext, and NO idea of how the hypertext she uses on a daily basis is IMPLEMENTED. Yet she uses it and has expectations and anticipations (about thinks like links and what they do, etc.) because of that. I know people in their 90s who have probably never heard the word "hypertext", but they know how to use a hypertext system when one is put in front of them. They don't know and don't care, and don't make use of any knowledge of, the underlying implementation technology (including its foibles and constraints).
I'm not saying that what you've said here is wrong, but it does speak to the danger of inferring what readers know, what they believe, and what they look for -- based on what AUTHORS or DEVELOPERS believe. And I guess another way of trying to put my point would be to say: Go back over the postings in this thread and scrub them of any mention of HTML and see what's left. You still have fundamental questions regarding design and UX that deserve serious consideration.
To talk about a link is to talk about a hypertext concept. To talk about a blue line is to talk about an artifact of implementation. To talk about HTML is to talk about part of the technology of a particular implementation of hypertext (well, it can be -- since HTML can implement things other than hypertext). One needs to hold these at bay from one another or crappy applications confused conceptualizations, and bad designs will result.
(Hence, again, my comments about talk about HTML and users' knowledge of it and other details of technology being irrelevant to the discussion.)