Many of the current electronic newspapers (e.g. OtaOnline
and Turun Sanomat) in the Internet WWW seem to share similar
design. There are a few "front pages" for which layouts are actually
built by hand. From the front pages one can reach a list of clickable
topics, and from each topic, article headings list etc. The hand-made
front pages are either topic categories that remain constant over time
(as in Turun Sanomat, see Fig. 1 a), or are built
separately for every paper (as in different newspapers participating
in OtaOnline). In each electronic newspaper, a page with a list of
article headings (see Fig. 1 b) may be automatically
produced, but the results are not very impressive. The page looks
rather boring and does not encourage one to proceed to the articles
themselves, because the headings are presented as a plain list and the
long lines with no variation do not help the reader in picking out an
interesting article. The dullness may be due to the fact that the
available visual design tools for publishers have
so far required a considerable amount of human labour, and it may not
have been considered worthwhile to spend so much time on the visual
design.
Figure: a) The front page and b,c) samples of two subsequent layers
of hierarchy of Turun Sanomat
With automatic pagination the list of article headings could instead be a page laid out with article headings and captions, with for example headings of different size describing the length or priority of the article. One could then click a heading to reach the whole article. The page laid out with headings and captions could include advertisements as well.
Methods and tools such as SGML, HTML and graphical WWW-browsers have enabled a big step towards automatic production of the layout by providing the means to easily structure information. These tools are designed especially for viewing the information with varying types of computers and different screen sizes and settings. The layouts are produced with a set of rules. The basic idea in these visualization tools is simple: the text and figures flow from left to right, from top to bottom into one wide column. Also reading is expected to take place in this order. Although this assumption is adequate for many publications, it is occasionally artificial and too restrictive, as often is the case with newspaper-like information.
Furthermore, more versatile and visually interesting layouts can be built with these tools only by rather explicit hand-made design of the outlook, and the material to be put to the page must be rather precisely known when designing the outlook in order to ensure visually pleasing results. This type of design is comparable to the hand-made design of newspaper page layouts---one exception being that in newspapers the page height is fixed, whereas in WWW there exists no such concept or restriction as page height.