Principia Hypertextica · A Mathematics Educator's View of Web Design
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These pages express my views about good web design. I was invited to prepare them by Jon Choate for the 1997 annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Minneapolis. For this reason, some of the examples are directed at mathematics educators and I include some discussion of the challenge of communicating mathematical ideas within the limits of HTML. But I hope that the design principles expressed on these pages will be useful for anyone who is preparing material for the web.
The invention of the World Wide Web puts a great tool in the hands of educators. Now we can share our ideas about mathematics teaching with a virtually unlimited audience. Students can express themselves and learn from others, do research, gather data, and publish their own results. Luckily, more and more schools are getting connected to the Internet, and as a result, more and more people are learning how to create web pages using the Hypertext Markup Language, known as HTML.
The good news is that a lot of material can be presented using HTML documents, and HTML documents are easy to write. They are just text files that contain some simple codes for describing the structural aspects of material and linking it to other sites on the web. You don't need a lot of fancy software to write an HTML document -- just an editor that saves text files. I use a Macintosh, and my favorite editor for writing HTML is BBEdit Lite, a freeware utility.
The bad news is that a lot of people write bad HTML files: files that are slow to load, inaccessible to many users, syntactically invalid, hard to navigate, and generally poor in content and design. This shouldn't be surprising. We discovered this with the advent of desktop publishing. When anyone can publish, the usual standards of typography are not always applied, and a lot of bad typography is one result. But that didn't mean that everything that was published from a desktop was bad or that designers or typographers disappeared. It was simply harder to find good typography amid the wealth of newly available material.
The same is true with web publishing. The rules of good information design and valid HTML coding are fairly simple to learn, but demanding to apply consistently. Luckily, the result of attention to detail pays off. Certainly you will agree that a well-designed web site is a joy to navigate through, providing delight as well as information, and a poorly designed site is quick to spot right away.
You have probably encouraged your own students to write their work carefully, use algorithmic thinking, list all the reasons for the steps in their proofs, and in general take care with the way they express themselves. We should ask for no less from ourselves as we design and publish web pages.
I have organized the material here using words that suggest what I value in good web sites: speed, accessibility, validity, and navigability. I also discuss the current difficulties of math typesetting, and provide a list of some useful links related to the issues presented on these pages.
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http://world.std.com/~wij/web-design/index.html
revised 26 June 1997
HTML 3.2 validated