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cni-modernization: Re: content vs image ads on the Net

Re: content vs image ads on the Net

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Mon, 27 Jun 1994 19:12:45 -0600 

Message-Id: <9406280013.AA17088@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 19:12:45 -0600
To: cni-modernization@cni.org
From: Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu (Albert Lunde)
Subject: Re: content vs image ads on the Net

>In terms of technique, I believe that the Home Page will eventually
>disappear.  What do you think?  Is the Home Page indispensable in the
>vocabulary of the HTML designer?  I believe that a matrix system will
>replace the hierarchy of the Home Page structure.

Well, you may be right, about a matrix approach ...

At the same time, right now, the top level menu/page of a web or gopher
site is the link least likely to break. If I'm making links to another
server, I give preference to linking to the top level.

(URNs and redirects are eventually supposed to fix this general problem but
aren't robust now.)

If you want to get your users to use a matrix approach you've got to offer
some static URLs to link to and/or make your home page an entry into the
different views.

One trick approach is to use a CGI gateway that encodes state information
as part of the path. i.e, instead of the URL being:

 http://bogus.com/this-stuff/that-stuff.html

it becomes something like:

 http://bogus.com/cgi-bin/male-20-30-techie/this-stuff/that-stuff.html

or

 http://bogus.com/cgi-bin/AF1245BDE/this-stuff/that-stuff.html

The gateway can serve up different views when they exist or maintain a
pseudo-connection id to save other status.

(The idea would be to have the gateway look for view-specific files and
default to generic files so you wouldn't need 2**N copies of the whole tree
for N different traits.)

You also need to provide consistent context cues so they don't feel "lost
in a maze of twisty little web pages all alike".

Making context-sensitive advertising without actually asking for
demographics or preferences would be non-trivial, but might be possible.


---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu

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