displaying multi-section html documents - best practices
- by ecpepper
I work at a research organization and we publish a lot of large-ish documents, usually organized in sections. What I want to know is how best to present these multi-section documents on our website.
Presently, what I do is load the entire document as a single page, with each section as its own div. Then I show and hide divs as needed via a table of contents and "next" and "prev" buttons.
The advantages to this are mainly: 1) that you can move between sections very quickly, 2) it produces consistent analytics (when a page is loaded, I know a report is being read).
The disadvantages, however, are real:
Readers can't take advantage of browser back/forward buttons to move between sections.
It's complicated to create direct links to individual sections (I can do it with javascript but it's not easy for other people to grab and share).
For long reports, you have to wait for the full report to load before you can move around (and that can include hordes of images and charts).
Do other people have thoughts on better ways to organize this? Here's an example of the current system: http://massbudget.org/825
