Layout rules for graphical web documents

The number of companies, institutions, and individuals competing for attention in the World-Wide Web is growing exponentially. This makes designing informative, easy-to-grasp, and visually appealing documents not only important for user-friendly information presentation, but also the key to success for any information provider. In this paper, we present layout guidelines for textual and graphical, static and dynamic, 2-D and 3-D Web documents which are drawn from fields as diverse as typography, Gestalt psychology, architecture, hypertext authoring, and human-computer interaction. Web documents are classified into five basic types, and our layout rules are applied to each of these. Finally, we show how currently evolving standards (HTML 3.0 for text and still graphics, Java for 2-D animation, and VRML for 3-D worlds) support applying those rules.

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