Adapting Print to the Web

Crawford Killian provides this excellent article on converting your print documents into online material. It’s not as simple as unilaterally cutting and pasting:

Even after 20 years, we still don�t enjoy scrolling through a long online document. So the unit of text on the Web is the chunk�a screen�s worth of information that includes links to other chunks.

What�s more, the chunk can�t be a solid mass of text. We scan Web text, looking for navigation guides, rather than reading line by line. Even a paragraph more than five or six lines long is unscannable. So we need subheads, bulleted lists, and plenty of white space. That lets us scan comfortably, finding what we want.