But the commercial influence goes beyond corporate sites and has changed our very expectations about how to experience a web site. We have come to expect web sites to feel technologically advanced rather than intellectually deep. Nearly every book on web site authoring repeats the advertising mantra that good sites contain dazzling but fast-loading graphics and minimal text. The web-user is assumed to have a short attention span and to be easily seduced by everything except complex ideas. On the web, simple text on a gray background appears cheap.
Crude technology is partly to blame.
Current computer monitors can show perhaps 2 or 3 paragraphs of picture-less text on the screen at one time at standard resolutions. Given this limitation, web sites are designed in two fashions. The first alternative is to treat a web page like a long papyrus scroll. This is highly discouraged by professional web designers but a common practice. Unfortunately, current web-browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer are not optimized for reading text.