Readers, authors, and page structure: A discussion of four questions arising from a content analysis of web pages

Previous research describing Web page and link classification systems resulting from a content analysis of over 75 Web pages left us with four unanswered questions. 1 What is the most useful application of page types: as descriptions of entire pages or as components that are combined to create pages? 2 Is there a kind of analysis that we can perform on isolated anchors, which can be text, icons, or both together, that is equivalent to the syntactic analysis for embedded and labeled anchors? 3 How explicitly are readers informed about what can be found by traversing a link, especially for the relatively broad categories of expansion and resource links? 4 Is there a relationship between the type of link and whether its target is a whole page or a fragment, or if its target is in the same site or a different site than its source? This article examines these questions under the assumption that the author and the reader of Web pages will cooperate in order to have successful communication. Our discussion leads to ideas of how author-provided context and readersʹ expectations and experience are combining to form new stylistic conventions and genres on the Web.