Building informational webs with PyStyler

The concept of navigational shock is best illustrated by an example.

Suppose you are reading a page on the web, and you see a link with the text see “How to play the flute,” and you click on that link, and it takes you to a short story entitled “Fungo bats at bay.” Wouldn't you find it to be a rather unpleasant, disorienting surprise?

The best way to avoid navigational shock is to use the same link text as the title of the page you're linking to. For example, if you have a link whose text is “How to play the flute,” and it takes you to a page entitled “How to play the flute,” the reader will not be disoriented.

It's also okay to use link text that isn't identical to the target page's title, so long as the reader isn't likely to be surprised. We'll call this a link variant.

For example, if you're in the middle of a series of pages on mastodon hunting, and every page's title starts “Mastodon hunting: …,” and you want to link to a page whose title is “Mastodon hunting: sometimes the mastodon gets you,” your link text might read “see the page on when the mastodon wins.” That might not be too bad a case of navigational shock.

Whether such a link variant constitutes navigational shock is a matter of judgement. The editor of a web might want to monitor such cases, and PyStyler provides an optional report that lists all these link variants.

Keep in mind that a link text should supply enough information so that the reader can make an informed decision about whether or not they want to go there. This ties in with some of the bedrock rules of technical writing, like using descriptive titles.