Ilse, 

Perhaps not Clos Du Bois Pinot Noir Sonoma County 1995,
or en your Vino Tinto,
but may be swillable -- or usable for cooking.  *smile*.

	This is mostly about navigation & scalability and meta-text.
	And ergonomics for maximal ease of use by all:

0.  faster, ergonomically easier long list pages:

	-- #top and #bottom anchors and frequent referencing to them
	   from under the sections of long, sectioned list pages helps. 
		 --> The redone ASGP Page of Links.

	-- going with the flow in link layout:

           Visualize someone arriving on Lyrics Are Poetry for the
	   first time, from "Babooshka", under Kate Bush, after
	   going to Kate Bush from Music, without yet visiting
	   subcategories of Literature.  Never mind the alarming
           plethora of specialized Back links in their face,
	   first thing on the page.  No, think of all of the links,
           just sitting there, the gestalt of it all:
           
           It's hard to apprehend the clutter of choices of outgoing
           links, most never visited, some implying returns to visits,
           intermixed with places one has seen (say, Poem of the Week).

           It would be less scary on arrival to see at the top of the
           page only interior links, if any, seeing them as a menu
           for the immediate meal ahead.  Here's the archetype:
           
                       #top
          -internal navigation if any -
           
                       |
               flow of the reading (including ->top  ->bottom if needed)
                       |
                       v
           
                    #bottom
                 -links to outside-
           
           This link placement flow follows the very scroll flow of
           the browser, and the reading motion of the eye and of the
           mouse/space bar hand or whatever pointer.  It's no accident
           LeeAnn/I adopted it on the ASGP site and stuck to it.  It's
           reader-friendly, fast.  And thus Lynx friendly, and thus
           custom-modality of reading friendly, as discussed before.

           Lynx does hurdles over the links up top before it gets to
	   the content.  It might as well only hurdle over what pertains
	   to the page.  On-demand hurdling.   Less is more. :)
           
1.  various.htm lost in the clutter

Looks good, validates, keeps the ul/li semantics, all cool.
Would benefit from a cleaner, consistent navigation scheme, as in (0).

But, as is, your home page's growth and its many-to-one mappings,
the various.htm page is nearly -hard- to get to, or even notice,
once one goes off elsewhere.  Is that good?

2.  rethinking Further: the Literature siblings

	-- you might wish to demote Lyrics Are Poetry to being a part
           of the Music page, and leave Music as the sole musical sibling
	   under Literature.  See (4) why.  Logical links same as now:
	   Fiction: Song Lyrics -> Lyrics Are Poetry (on Music)

	-- you might wish to edit appearance of the Literature link label:

           It now says: "Literature: Poetry | ...".

           Once followed, no mention of "Literature" anywhere.

	   Literature is a good word to keep, but right now it's hard
	   to figure out if it modifies only Poetry or the entire row of
	   the siblings!  My eye wants to bind Literature to Poetry only.

	    Plus, following that 1st link, Poetry, treacherously bifurcates
	    into a world of poems on your server, with two separate indices,
	    and a grab-bag of everything else, also including poetry, only
	    not on your web page, so flowing out of your space  -plus- 
	    there is a Literature sibling link under a subsection
	    ("Song Lyrics"->Lyrics are Poetry).  Ok, be that way, nonlinear
	    and all -- but the navigation should then be extremely clear.


3.  the two Author/Poem tables have inconsistent behavior under Lynx.

One renders right: just like in a graphic browser.  The other collapses
into a  vertical run (Poems by Author).

It would be better to embed both as ul/il so as to make sense of them
semantically as a list to an intelligent browser or search engine that
may make use of that information in the future -- a reading browser, or
a search made for lists, for instance.  Tables also load slower on my
IIci under Netscape 3.04.  Browsers wait until the table code is all
parsed.  You can avoid slowing the loading, minimize possible breakage,
and provide better time behavior as these pages grow.

You could use the dl/dt/dd or just dl/dd definition list mechanism which
would offer both indentation and semantic grouping akin to ul/li.  These
are not problematic as tables to fragile browsers.

There is no reason to use tables here semantically, and in fact, they
disguise the semantics -- the content -is- an unordered list, or in
the case of Poem by Author (the one that collapses), a definition list.

You are losing meta-information that may be of use.  For instance, I
envision browsers giving summaries and outlines of sites, so it would
be nice not to fool such a browser which otherwise might speak out
loud:
	 'Ilse.Hirvonen@mail.com has a -list- of links here called...'
vs.

	 'Ilse... has a table of things here, 2 columns by n rows,...'.

Possibly a future search engine searching for lists not just snippets
of text may favor your list over other results.

4.  the music stuff is very hard to navigate or visualize a map for.

What you have now is a mess that locally looks beautiful to the eye but
is a pain to move around in.  I know you are redoing the site, so here
is a navigation improvement suggestion:

A single Music portal at Further + introducing #top/#bottom (0), and
the top-navigation and bottom-navigation on long list pages would
streamline navigation, make the pages scalable, make the browsing fast
for anyone who lands on those pages, especially people coming in from
search engine snags.

You already relegated Lyrics Are Poetry to a subsection of music.htm
-as a link-.  Place it on music.htm physically --  doing so would help
people with the Within-the-Page searches, once they snag the page with a
search engine -- or once they come in through the front door and ask
themselves if you have this or that.  In a word, you would allow
browsing to the fullest, browsing by reminding.

You already break up pages correctly by graphic content -- but there
is no reason to not coalesce related pure texts.

Also: Breaking up things across tiny pages makes it harder to search
using the Find/Find Next.  That functionality is one great advantage of
pure text html in a simple browser vs. seeing information encoded
graphically in jpegs.  And you know from your logs, people tend not to
go deep into convoluted trees.  For some it may be physically taxing...

The present lyrics.htm would instantly benefit from being but on
music.htm and having music.htm use top-/bottom- navigation and (0).



Ok, enough.  These are not parental encroachments, don't be annoyed.
Think of them as neurological opinion of fellow parent who dabbles in
sports medicine :) -- I want your baby to flex something lovely for
everyone who visits.  I also hope to learn from your say.  I already have
learned a lot.  All this offered freely, with room for being wrong.

*hug*

				-- Marek


-- 
  -------------------  http://www.enteract.com/~marek/  -------------------
  1 Clickable geomap   Magical Mystery Tour   last add   Kristie's postcard
  2 HalinaFAQ (now also po polsku)  Halina Poswiatowska Translation Project
  3 A Small Garlic Press (ASGP)  A 501c3 Nonprofit Corp  $2/chapbook poetry