Sunday Night Sweet

The WWW page-length debate

Jorn Barger January 2000

Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:

# How long will it take each section to display?

# How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?

# Is one long page more boring than several short pages?

# Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?

# What if the reader wants to print it?

# What if the reader wants to search it?

# What about net-wide search engines?

# Which will make it easier to find a particular section?

# How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?

# Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?

# Will people scroll all the way to the end?

# Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?

# Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?

# Can you track readers better with multiple pages?

# Is it disorienting to scroll through

a long document?

# Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?

# Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?

Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.

There are also a few comments of my own.

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How long will it take each section to display?

"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?

"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx

"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99

"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98

None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)

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How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?

"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?

"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95

"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712

"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97

"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR

"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte

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Is one long page more boring than several short pages?

"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant