The effects of linking on genres of Web documents

Author

Crowston, K. ; Williams, M.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Inf. Studies, Syracuse Univ., NY, USA

Volume

Track2

fYear

1999

fDate

5-8 Jan. 1999

Abstract

Documents on the World Wide Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document´s form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns of linking in a common genre of document, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file. In a sample of 70 FAQs, we found four patterns of linking: no links, links within the page, links to pages on the same host and links to other hosts. We suggest that links that tie together document pieces simply recreate the already accepted FAQ genre, but links that provide navigation within the document or that link to other information sources begin to extend and adapt the FAQ genre to the needs and capabilities of the Web.

Keywords

hypermedia; information resources; FAQ file; Web page linking; World Wide Web document genres; frequently asked questions; hyperlinks; information sources; navigation; Character recognition; Corporate acquisitions; Electronic mail; Information retrieval; Internet; Joining processes; Multimedia communication; Multimedia systems; Navigation; Web pages;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Systems Sciences, 1999. HICSS-32. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on

Conference_Location

Maui, HI, USA

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0001-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HICSS.1999.772648

Filename

772648