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Here, we're testing an alternative presentation of the header
for documents on the Artemis Project web site. This presentation
puts the name of Artemis Project in the upper left-hand corner of
each document, with the section title and number right-justified
on the right-hand side.
Our goal for the header is to reduce the amount of screen real estate devoted to presenting this information while still telling the user where the web page is and providing navigation aids.
Note that there isn't any reference to the Artemis Data Book in the standard decorations. We did that on purpose; many visitors told that it took a long time for them to figure out that the Artemis Data Book contained almost the entire Artemis Project web site. The distinction among the many sections of the Artemis Data Book is important to us because it helps keep everything organized and provides a mechanism for consitent presentation of subject titles, but the visitor is more concerned with content than how our card catalog works.
We've added a redesigned Nav Bar at the top of the page, and repeated it at the bottom of the page to make it easy to navigate back from lengthy documents. We've also linked the section title and section number to make it easy to get back to the table of contents for the section you're in. It might look better if those things were not underlined, though.
We also want to get the width of the web pages under control so that we present the information to the user in the best way we can. We do this by having the main body of the document inside a fixed-width table cell.
The table width is set to 504 pixels. This width is attractive and convenient for presentation on computer screens of any size, and it it fits within the 544 x 378 size of the WebTV screen. I included the moon base picture as ane example of a typical illustration in the Artemis Data Book. The picture measures 256 x 192, the most common size of picture found in the Imagery Libary.
For more information about WebTV, including links to the WebTV site where you can download a WebTV simulator for your computer, see the WebTV Design Guide.
The nav bar in the footer for this document has the same links as listed in the current (13 March 1999) home page for the web site; and its design echoes the design of the header. We've also moved the document number to the footer; although this information is important to identifying and cataloguing the thousands of Artemis Project documents, it's not essential enough to take up real estate at the top of the page.
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