The BookMetaphor requires a web site to be structured like a book. My old pages are like that: There is a table of contents, the pages are linked, there is a hierarchy of chapters, sections, subsections, there is an index with keywords. All these ideas don't scale well when we're talking about a collaborative web site such as a wiki.
The huge HyperText collection makes it more or less impossible to maintain the BookMetaphor. The oldest WikiWiki had more than 14000 pages in spring 2001! There is no way these pages can be organised as one book. You'd have to split them up into several books. And then you'd have to organise the books like a library. Not very comforting.
That's why I abandoned the BookMetaphor for my web site. I'm trying to find a new metaphor to describe how navigation is supposed to work. A good place to learn more about hyper text problems is the MeatballWiki.
SiteMap / AllPages / Out / kensanata@yahoo.com / Last change: 2001-03-03