Make the pain less

Genevieve of You Cried for Night has posted this link to some excellent tips for web-writers. As a writer and editor, I learned these tips (or are they rules?) for web writing a little while ago, but it's always worth being reminded of them, and why they're important. Especially when so well put:

"the main point is simple: reading from a screen is a pain, and writers and editors should do everything they can to make the pain less. This involves using shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs, providing ample left and right margins and off-white plain backgrounds (never patterned backgrounds, please!), dark type, clear page navigation systems, easy-to-grasp contents pages, and so forth."

That is from the editorial style guide at Jacket, a free literary magazine. Its style guide includes lots of other excellent guidelines for writers and editors, especially for web-writing. Now I want to read the actual magazine!