Epilogue

I designed this interface based on the common physical metaphor of a book with pages. This metaphor is not used much anymore; online/onscreen notebooks still exist, but mostly in the form of software packages for note-taking rather than as a means of content presentation. Most website content is now deployed as a more simple cover page hyperlinked to various sub-pages. Even academic journals, long printed in book form, now appear online as individual PDF files indexed on a simple webpage. There seems to be little interest in deploying web content in book form, however natural the metaphor.

The preference for a single page instead of several in a path is probably a logical and inevitable choice. Nevertheless, web books do have one advantage: they avoid long webpages. This reduces possibly long download times (though this is much less of an issue than it was when I started the project). It also removes the need to scroll so much. The web design gurus used to tell us repeatedly that “people don’t like to scroll”, though those same people are probably much more used to scrolling by now. Paging has another advantage over scrolling, a cognitive/pedagogical one: it helps to chunk material mentally. Clicking to advance to the next page requires the viewer to decide that he’s finished with the current page - to decide that “OK, I’ve got it, let’s move on”. Simple scrolling doesn’t require the reader to decide if he’s understood what he’s read before scrolling (which may or may not fit the viewer's reading style).

There’s also an advantage to presenting content as branching paths, as the BinderBabies do – it is then possible to present the content in layers of difficulty or relevance. For example, an appropriately designed module presented in a BinderBaby could be read on three levels: basic (using level one paths only), intermediate (using both level one and level two paths) and complete (using paths at all three levels). The advantage would be a more flexible module than one designed to be read and studied in its entirety by everyone alike.

BinderBabies have a major disadvantage not shared with paper books: in a BinderBaby, it’s difficult to get a clear idea of just where you are in the content and which paths you’ve read. What’s needed is some sort of map of the content indicating where the reader is and where he’s been. As a project for a visualization course, I designed such an interface and implemented a small part of it. (Though the branching structure there is somewhat different.) This interface also shows how searching branched content could work, another feature the BinderBabies lack.

In retrospect, I’m somewhat amazed that I could managed to push this interface as far as I did using only javascript. I wound up making something more like a web application than a website; a “proto-CMS” (content management system), though most current CMSs are more concerned with student management and communication than presenting content. The vision was a grand one, at least for an amateur, and if the technology had been more stable at the time, the project might have evolved into something more lasting. As it is, I’ve moved on to Flash with actionscript as a design technology, to much smaller and focussed projects, and to understanding what makes onscreen widgets and interactive diagrams work for communicating mathematics.

Epilogue