LINMO

Guidelines: Glossaries

A glossary is an alphabetized list of specialized terms and concepts along with brief definitions or explanations that is placed after the main body of text in a book or other document.

Glossaries serve an important function. They make content easier to understand and more useful for a wider range of readers by providing a centralized location for explaining specialized terms and concepts without interrupting the flow of text for readers who are already familiar with such terms and concepts.

Although traditional glossaries can also be useful for web sites, they are generally not the optimal solution for content-rich sites. This is because the web makes it not only possible, but also relatively simple, to substantially improve upon their functionality.

The optimal solution is to have a separate page for each glossary entry and to treat each such page in the same way as every other content page on the site. Each page on a LINMO-compatible site is designed to be a self-contained article (i.e., an article about some subtopic that can be understood by a person with no prior knowledge of the topic), and thus each such page can, in effect, be viewed as an expanded glossary entry for items on other pages which are linked to it. That is, every page on the site serves as a glossary page for some term or concept mentioned on at least one other page.

The advantages of this integrated approach are several, and they hark back to the optimized modular concept that is at the core of the LINMO model:

(1) Sufficient space is available for explaining each term or concept without concern that a single-page glossary is becoming so long that its usability is adversely affected. Terms and concepts that are novel enough to at least some readers to require that they be included in a glossary might require multiple paragraphs of explanation, as well as links to other pages on the site and even footnotes where appropriate. In a hard copy (i.e., printed on paper) book, in contrast, there would be little if any advantage of having a separate page for each glossary entry, and there would be the disadvantage of wasting a lot of paper.

(2) A user clicking on a link to learn more about a specific term or concept can expect to be taken directly to a page specifically about that term or concept. There will be no need to scroll through a long page and then just find a sentence or two about the desired term or concept. Also, bandwidth consumption will be minimized because it will not be necessary to download a long glossary about topics unrelated to the desired topic each time.

(3) The creation of the hierarchy of indexes (i.e., general and specific), which is a key part of LINMO-compatible web sites, is simplified, and such indexes will be more efficient for users.

(4) In many cases a reader will want just a very brief explanation of a term or concept (in addition to that on the page being looked at) rather than a full page, and thus it might seem that a traditional glossary entry would be more appropriate. As LINMO-compatible web pages are generally written with the inverted pyramid (i.e., the most general content is placed at the beginning) style that is used in newspaper articles, all that is necessary in such case is for the user to read the first sentences, or first paragraphs, of the linked page, as desired.

(5) The replacement of glossaries by separate pages for each glossary entry could improve the efficiency of searches using web search engine sites. This is because a person using a search engine to find information about a topic will learn that if a result points to a page on a LINMO-compatible site, then that result is likely pointing to a full page about the topic rather than to just a brief glossary entry about it.