Quoting Patrick Boylan:

> Milton's comment re international committee descriptions
> shows just how important both the new search facility and
> better "home page" indexing (not yet done) are.

The search engine treats the welcome page exactly as every other
page on the site. What, beyond that, is "home page indexing"?

I am considering installing what is called a "site map" on the
server, but its contents are probably too modest for this to make
any real sense. (The directory structure has deliberately been
kept as flat as possible to avoid trouble keeping the mirror
sites in sync. For similar reasons, serverside processes are only
installed when they meet a genuine need.)

I otherwise suspect that it is axiomatic that any page at the top
of a document hierarchy could be restructured in a manner that
more clearly reveals the contents of what lies below.

> I know that we don't want an opening page that's too big for
> those with limited Internet access and old machines to open
> (and some of us still feel a bit bruised after the protests
> over the original web version of the AFRICOM Documentation
> Standards).  However, I suspect that the home page could be
> rather more detailed without making it so big that it becomes
> difficult to access.

If we're talking about a page that contains primarily text, time
in transport is not a relevant constraint. Any network connection
can comfortably be used to fetch a page that is longer than
anyone could be expected to read. The current page length has
been set on the basis of the rule of thumb that states that any
page longer than three screensful in an "average" viewing
environment, is likely not to be read fully.

Transport time becomes an issue when a page includes a
significant amount of, for example, graphics. For this reason,
most people who have slow connections simply disable the
automatic loading of anything other than text. This causes
trouble, often of critical significance, if the pages are
meaningless unless the images are loaded. That was one of the
primary issues in the discussion about the AFRICOM Documentation
Standards document. There is plenty that could be done with the
welcome page on the ICOM site, including making it longer,
without triggering controversy.

/Cary


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