21 Too long

I may sound foolish hear, but I came to this article expecting to find 10 tips and got, instead, ten short essays on writing for the web.

I think a bullet list would have sufficed.

Truth of the matter is that only the passionate reader can be bothered to read much of what’s on the screen – that’s the good thing about evolving content – you get a little something each day, barely even a half screenful.

This article is everything that web articles should avoid being… (in length terms). Other than that, it’s good advice ;)

posted at 05:27 pm on August 17, 2002 by Ashley Frieze

22 Can I edit that...?

When I said “hear” above… well, I meant “here” – if only we could go back and edit those things ;)

posted at 05:29 pm on August 17, 2002 by Ashley Frieze

23 Awesome

Truly a wonderful piece of writing. I thank you for giving me this to read.

posted at 06:59 pm on August 17, 2002 by Andrew

24 Elegant

Elegant is a word I learned in Programming which also applies here.

Before Y2K I used to write stuff like this

YYMMDD * 100.0001 = MMDDYY in which the fields had no decimal places.
Multiplying YYMMDD by 100 got MMDD00
Multiplying YYMMDD by 0.0001 got 0000YY
You see how it moves the whole number over?

For someone looking at the code
YYMMDD * 100.0001 = MMDDYY
was so elegant, obvious what the programmer was doing.

Unfortunately this kind of coding was not an efficient way to run on a computer. We not only want our code to be obvious, we also want it to run efficiently on our computers.

In this case, we want our text to run efficiently in the brains of the humans who look at it. Your article has elegance. I quoted extensively from it on my weblog.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/2002/08/17.html#a87

I hope I was successful in making clear where the ideas came from, and what was quoted from where. This can be challenging when in my reality the path was: A List Apart; Mac Net Journal; dws Radio FAQ; Al Macintyre, with each of us annotating what we saw.

posted at 09:43 pm on August 17, 2002 by Al Macintyre

25 Elegant?

Quote:
For someone looking at the code
YYMMDD * 100.0001 = MMDDYY
was so elegant, obvious what the programmer was doing.

Er… no! Not elegant at all – in fact completely up its own rear end (and nor is it what I would call obvious). It assumes that you lose the decimal and truncate the whole part to its least significant 6 digits, and it takes a fair bit of explaining before you understood why it works. Do not confuse “elegant” with “smartarse”.

posted at 03:05 am on August 18, 2002 by Ashley Frieze

26 What about that infamous web statistic....

… of web attention span? I find myself skimming and scrolling, capturing only the first sentences of each paragraph to find what the “kernel of truth” was.

writing for the web, if of personal nature, is interpretive and subjective. maybe I don’t want to write about “why” but “what” and let my audience figure out their own “why’s.”

Jane

posted at 08:58 am on August 18, 2002 by JC

27 credit where due

The advice offered here won’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s read Rebecca Blood’s book [i]The Weblog Handbook[/i], to which this article bears more than a passing resemblance.

http://www.rebeccablood.net/handbook/index.html

posted at 02:42 pm on August 18, 2002 by Robert

28 Number 11

Great points, though I was expecting the usual #11 when dealing with advice of this nature:

11. Don’t let anyone tell you how to write.

posted at 04:59 pm on August 18, 2002 by Christopher Robbins

29 9/10 for 10 Tips

I enjoyed Mark’s article. While I am not new to the Web, I am just starting writing for the Web (I have a project to publish a work on St. Augustine of Hippo and his relevance to modern political philosophy).

I would like to see more articles like this.

Re. your recommendation of tools; I would like to add:
TextPad (www.textpad.com) as a very good text editor
NoteTab (www.notetab.com) as the next best text editor
MyInfo 2 (www.milenix.com/index.php) as a very good ‘ideas processor’.

Ideas processors (or outliners) are a good tool for drafting any material for publication. They allow you to put your ideas together in a hierarchical tree and add text material to the idea nodes. For a comprehensive site on these tools see: http://john.redmood.com/organizers.html and www.outliners.com

Please do some more articles on this topic.

Regards,
Peter

posted at 09:32 pm on August 18, 2002 by Peter Anderson

30 Disagree about the spelling and punctuation

From Section 10.

“Don’t worry too much about correctness . . . and nearly all will forgive, errors in punctuation and spelling. Leave Fowler and Roget on the shelf, unless they’re your old friends. . . . “

This premise is somewhat incorrect as you are writing not only for your own visible language, where readers will see the context, but also for screen readers for the visually impaired or through translation engines where the particular “miss” will not be well understood.

And accessibility is part of Web Standards, is it not?

posted at 07:01 am on August 19, 2002 by John Colby