If I'm doing print brochures, sometimes I try not to put too much detail in them, because I don't want to have to throw away a bunch of printed brochures when information changes. With the Web, I can keep my information fresh and detailed. Also, the Web shows you information in very small windows relative to the amount of text you can get on a book page. So Webpages really are about the size of your typical business envelope, as far as the amount of information you can show at any time. Oh, but it's not the same.
People get tired of scrolling, and the brain gets confused.
So as Web designers, we have to write copy the way we would write for a slide presentation. Small 'chunks' at a time, lots of white space. We let the eye rest in between pages. The fonts with the extra ornamentation are called Serif fonts, and the plain Jane versions are called Sans Serif . Unfortunately, all those little extra bits in the serif fonts, the same things that make reading flow smoothly from one word to the next in print, can cause fuzziness when they're displayed on a computer screen, so many designers prefer sans serif fonts like Arial for online display.