Web Organization is not Like Book Organization

One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is that webs are not organized like other things — books in particular. And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization is somewhat different from book organization. It is so different that you can’t even look at web organization the way you look at book organization.

And that may be the biggest problem in moving content to the Web. We are used to being able to look at the organization of our content in a particular way, from the top down, and that does not work on the Web. That makes the difference very difficult to get used to.

Traditional book organization is either linear, or hierarchical. The organization is expressed through a table of contents, which is either a simple ordered list or a nested/hierarchical list like this:

 

In this organization, you can look at the organization as a whole, from the outside, as it were, looking down on the work.

In a book, the organization is not apparent from an individual page. A page might, at most, contain headings that locate the page in a particular chapter or section, but it does not show you how that chapter or section is related to the rest of the book. For that you have to turn to the table of contents — a separate page or set of pages that describes the organization. The organization is clear and visible from the outside, but invisible from the inside.

Tri-pane help systems change this somewhat. They place the TOC in a pane alongside the page. You can now see where the page fits in the organization of the book because the content page and the TOC are side by side. (Some Web based help systems don’t keep the TOC in sync with the current page if the user uses non-TOC links to navigate, so then you are back to separate page and TOC.)

But, as Tom Johnson has noted, when you start to pour more and more content into the help system, the TOC becomes so large that it becomes unwieldy:

Browsing also becomes problematic when you have 4,000 topics in the table of contents (the one-stop-shopping model). Browsing through books and sub-books and sub-sub books and sub-sub-sub books to find the right topic is tedious.

If you expand out all levels of the table of contents, the information starts to look really complex. Users may feel intimidated and overwhelmed about where to even begin.

It becomes more and more difficult to get a sense of the organization of the whole in one glance, from the top down. There is simply too much stuff. And if you deal with the volume by introducing more layers of hierarchy, finding the position of any particular piece of content becomes less and less intuitive as the organization of the hierarchy becomes more and more arbitrary.

Webs don’t work this way at all. Pages in a web do not hang off a table of contents like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Web pages link to each other along multiple lines of subject affinity. (I introduced the concept of subject affinity in A New Approach to Organizing Help.) There is no page one in a web, and no set order of pages. If there were, it would not be a web. It is the multiplicity of links and the lack of a fixed starting point that define any system as a web rather than a sequence or hierarchy.

This is what happens if you try to draw a map of a web:

With only a few nodes in the web, you can make some sense of its overall organization, but when you add more nodes and more links, all semblance of order, and all hope of comprehension, disappears from the top down view:

We saw with books that you could not see the organization from the individual page, you needed to look from the top down, at the map of the book created by a table of contents. With a web, the exact opposite is true. You cannot see the organization from the top down. But, in a properly constructed web page, the organization is contained in the page itself.

 

This Web page, the Wikipedia article on the Manicouagan Crater, shows how it is related to the web to which it belongs in multiple ways. On the left, it shows its relationship to the same subject in different languages. On the right, it places its subject in space and provides the standard metadata of its subject area, such as age, diameter, and whether the crater is exposed. In the body, links connect it to all the significant related subjects that are mentioned in the text. At the bottom, the subject is located in the structure for the two academic disciplines which study it: astronomy and geology. Thus it is mapped into the web in which it resides along multiple lines of subject affinity.

Look at those relationships, and all the other crisscrossing relationships of all the other topics in the web, from the top down, and all you will see is chaos. Look at the individual topic, however, and its position in the Web, its organizational relationship to the Web, is crystal clear.

Of course, the page does not contain the organization of the entire Web. In the nature of a Web, that total view is impossible. What it contains is the organization of its vicinity within the Web. When you navigate a web, you do not go from the top down. You go from one node to a related node. You navigate through the web from one page to another along the lines of subject affinity expressed by the links in the content.

Letting go of the top-down view

For the author who has made their career writing books, this lack of a top-down view can be the most difficult thing to adapt to when they start to write for the Web.

Authors rightly feel that it is their responsibility to organize content for readers. This does not necessarily mean that the author expects readers to read sequentially, but at least they feel that they should provide clear navigation that allows the reader to easily select and navigate content for themselves. But how can you tell if you have done a good job of that — and how can you demonstrate to your boss that you have done a good job of that — if you cannot see the map of your content organization as you work, and they cannot see it when you are finished?

The writer’s desire to produce a visibly organized set of content is therefore very understandable. And yet, completing that task in a Web environment has proved an insurmountable challenge. There is too much content and the significant relationships between pieces of content are too numerous to be flattened into a comprehensible or navigable hierarchy. The bottom line is, it does not serve readers well.

Any top-down navigation scheme for content becomes untenable as the size of the content set grows. (This is why encyclopedias have been in alphabetical order for the last several centuries. None of the many schemes proposed for a universal tree of knowledge have proved remotely workable.) Dividing content into several books allows the author to create a top-down organization for each book, but as soon as the reader has a problem or an inquiry that requires them to go out of the current book, the are dropped into the arduous task of finding the right book.

Fobbing off the reader onto the librarian

Book finding is outside the author’s responsibility. It is the librarian’s field of expertise, not the writer’s, and so producing a book with a good top-down organization can give the writer a feeling of satisfaction that they have done their job well. But for the reader whose needs and interests span more than one book, navigating between books is a far more onerous task compared to searching within a book. If we take the whole of the reader’s need into account, we see that merely providing isolated top-down-structured books is not meeting their whole need at all.

A fully traversable web does far more to meet the user’s total information needs. It does so by search and by linking. Search is essentially a jump out of the web and a parachute back into it at a different point. Links are the pathways of the Web itself. They are the strands that define a web as a web. Links can take the reader both far and near, along all the various lines of subject affinity that converge in a topic. The parachute jump that is search often does not land you in the precise place you want to be, but links can then take you the last mile of your journey.

If the links are missing, people can construct them for themselves using the search function, though this is necessarily less exact, and more time consuming for the reader. Rich and accurate linking provides a more navigable route through the immediate vicinity and distant affinities of the content. (Jared Spool has recently published research results that indicate that links provide better navigation success than site searches.)

Adopting the local, bottom up view of content organization

Web organization is always local, therefore. Not local in the sense that one page only links to pages close to it (if the concept of closeness has any meaning in cyberspace), but in the sense that the navigational and organizational clues and tools that it provides are particular to the individual page. They are local to its subject matter. Each page has its own set of associations and affinities. Some of those affinities are local, and some are distant, but they are all related to the current place.

This contrasts markedly to books in which local navigation, though possible, through footnotes and cross references, is rare and usually entirely absent. The only organization and navigation provided by most books is global. The reader who wants to trace a subject affinity, whether inside or outside the book, is generally given no local navigational options; they must go to the global TOC or index.

To describe the book’s organizing principles as “global” though, means only global to the book itself. They are not global in the sense of being based on a global information resource or a global view of the subject matter. Content on that scale defies global organization, meaning that only a web can organize content on that scale, and that it does it not with a global view, but with a local view based on the subject affinities of whatever content object the reader is currently reading.

And, of course, it is likely that wherever the reader is now, unless they are hopelessly lost and in the entirely wrong place, the place they will want to go next is a place that has one or more subject affinities with the place they are now. (If they are lost, then search is their friend.) By focusing on the subject affinities of the reader’s current location, a web provides a far more usable structure and navigation of a vast content set than the book’s top down approach could ever manage.

Most emphatically, the switch to web-style bottom-up organization does not mean an abandonment of organizing content as part of the writer’s task. But the writer can fairly ask how they are suppose to organize when they cannot see the organization they are creating. The answer is that an organized web requires a set of organizing principles that are based on cataloging the types of subject affinities that exist in the content set and setting and enforcing policies on how those affinities are expressed and related in each topic in the web. The use of appropriate structured writing tools can help enormously in enabling, enforcing, an auditing content based on these principles.

This, then, is the great hurdle that tech comm needs to overcome to really start delivering content to the Web. It has to learn how to break itself of the top-down organizational schema of the book world, and learn to adopt, to create, and to manage, the bottom-up organizational schema that supports an information collection as vast, as vibrant, and as fluid as the Web.