Each experience requires a different design approach. Pages for online use should be relatively short, with text content that has been carefully edited to allow fast scanning. But the Web is also a great distribution medium for more complex fare. Most readers will simply print long documents, and read from the paper version. Slate , Salon , the Chronicle of Higher Education , and the New York Times Web sites prove this nonsense wrong every day.
Good content wins every time.
I think the current Web design mantra that the design form of a document should be cleanly separable from text, graphic, or multimedia content is a chimera dreamed up by technologists who have never designed a publication or been responsible for persuasively communicating with a general audience. True media effectiveness requires tight integration of structure and presentation. If you need to effectively reach readers on their Palm Pilots, design for that medium . Insisting that your home page produce an equally meaningful experience for users of computers, WebTV boxes, Palm Pilots and cell phones is just silly. My personal opinion is that every serious Web designer will be adopting CSS over the next year, but that few designers will ever use CSS the way its creators envisioned.