Independent Counsel's Report
A more readable version of the "Starr Report"
Last modified: 10/6/98
The Independent Counsel's Report to Congress, often called the "Starr Report", is a highly visible example of taking content written for printing linearly and posting it on-line. Trellix Corporation's "more readable" version has been widely praised and is included here.

Introduction
No matter what your opinion of the content of the Independent Counsel's Report, it is clear that the decision to post it on the Internet was a milestone in the history of on-line content in everyday life. Millions of readers, including television news anchors, received their first glimpse on a computer screen.

Dan Bricklin, the author of much of this web site up until this point, and others at Trellix Corporation felt that such an officially important document that was being read on-screen should at least attempt to follow some of the Good Documents principles. With that in mind, Dan and the Trellix Professional Services Group (which does document conversions to HTML, as well as providing help with this web site) undertook the task of turning the official report posted on the government web site into a more readable on-screen form. This sample is the result of that task.

The reaction from readers and commentators has been very favorable, and it has served as a catalyst for fueling the ongoing discussion of making material on-line more readable. This positive response to the format, no matter what the reader's opinion of the content, encouraged us to add the Report as a sample on the Good Documents web site. Also, it is a classic example of the problem frequently facing many corporate webmasters when they are given material written for print to post on the company Intranet or company external web site.

We assume that, due to the high profile of this document throughout the Web, that visitors to this web site are familiar enough with its content to know if they will be offended by reading it and will avoid it in that case. The tour provided below attempts to only bring up screens (if you don't scroll) that are not sexually explicit. Since we decided to leave the content unchanged, only adding navigation, we did not have much ability to make the material more appropriate for this web site.

Disclaimer:
The content of these materials were built from the report posted on http://thomas.loc.gov as of September 13, 1998, as forwarded by the Office of the Independent Counsel. The complete text of the report is included and unaltered. The following alterations were made to the document to assist in navigation and readability (some of these alterations were made by those that provided the HTML on the government site):
•   The conversion to HTML has altered the pagination and format. Our conversion altered it further.
•   The original Table of Contents is not provided. The Table of Contents we use is derived from the one provided by Congress, apparently the Independent Counsel had a different one.
•   The content of the page border area on the left side of the screen is intended solely as a navigational aid and should not be construed as part of the official document. We added it.
•   Links were recreated between footnote references and the associated footnotes as well as from the Table of Contents to the individual pages.
•   Summaries were created using the first paragraph of the associated section.

Note: This report contains sexual content which may be inappropriate for younger readers.

Business uses of this type of document include:
•   Project Reports: From consultants or teams
•   Legal Documents: Contracts, filings, opinions, transcripts, etc.
•   Analysis: Competitive, project post-mortem, etc.

The particular style used here is designed for a highly structured document, with many sub-sections of equal importance, and many short footnotes that are an integral part of the material.

Goals of the design and how they were met:

The goal was to quickly make the Independent Counsel's Report, as posted on a Congressional web site, more readable on-screen without changing the text. This was accomplished through a variety of navigational techniques:

•   A "You are here" map was used to give an overview of the entire document. The page divisions were based on the organization of the document in files and headings as downloaded from the government.
•   Sidebar navigation was used within each page to give quick access to other pages at the same level as well as to sub-sections within the page. The words on the sidebar were chosen to be short. Usually the first somewhat unique word or two was used. A better method would have been to summarize the section in one to three words, but we decided that doing so could change the meaning of the document and refrained from doing it in this case.
•   Footnotes were placed in a companion frame below the main text. Following footnote links in the main text causes the footnote to scroll into view simultaneously with the referring text.
•   Lists of main topics and summaries were added. The summaries used are the first paragraph of the section. In some cases this is a good summary, in others it is just the opening text and does not summarize the section.

This sample is an example of powerful uses of frames. (See "When (and how) to use Frames" in the Techniques section.) The Frame feature of HTML was used to implement the map, the sidebar navigation, and the footnotes. The entire document is bookmarkable. "You are here" indications are used in both the map and the sidebars.

Start a "guided tour" of the document

Note: This document was designed to just about fit on a 640x480 screen. The tour adds an additional sidebar for comments and a small navigation bar at the bottom, so it works better in 800x600 or larger screens.

The individual stops on the tour: The Map   |   The Sidebar   |   Footnotes   |   Lists with summaries   |   Table of Contents

Start reading the document without comments (NOT a tour)

You can browse the full sample itself without the tour comments.

This sample does not have a link back to Good Documents. You must either use the browser "Back" button or history list, or start anew from www.gooddocuments.com.

Comments:

There have been numerous articles and postings about this version of the report. One that we can link to is John Dodge's column in PCWeek, "Starr Report: The Contents not the only horrible thing" (http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/columns/0,4351,351939,00.html).

Alternative designs:

The original, more linear version of the same material is available for comparison. The Report was made available as eight HTML files. Some are short (1KB), others are long (458KB). The files, "1cover.htm", "2toc.htm", etc., are presented here with a left-side frame to aid in selecting them and returning to this page. They were normally presented on the web with a single link to the "1cover.htm" or "2toc.htm" file, as they were on the "0ThomasIntro.html" page on http://thomas.loc.gov. The "2toc.htm" page looks like a table of contents that breaks the rest of the document into many sections. In actuality, most of the hundreds of links are to anchors within the other seven files (note how they all turn the "visited link" color if you click on one in a section).

Start the original HTML posted on http://thomas.loc.gov with a left-side frame added to aid in selecting the individual files.

How the sample was created:

The sample was created using Trellix 2.0 by the Trellix Professional Services Group. The original text was downloaded as HTML from http://thomas.loc.gov (it was the updated version, posted Saturday, September 12, 1998, not the original one posted Friday). A document design was created specifically for this report. A new Trellix 2.0 document was created using that design. The sections of text and their footnotes were then moved from the HTML displayed in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 into the Trellix 2.0 document using normal clipboard copy and pasting (IE 4.0 puts Rich Text on the clipboard; Netscape Navigator only provides raw, unformatted text). The map was organized to fit on 640x480 screens. The sidebar links were typed in and linked. Links to anchors in frames on the same page were done with the "Link to an Anchor on/Current Page..." command. The cut/pasting preserved the anchor location of the target from the original HTML, so only the creating of the link was needed but not the specifying of the location for the target. There were over 1,600 footnotes to be linked this way. A few hundred more links were made to anchors within the main text. Hundreds more links were created automatically by Trellix 2.0 for the side navigation and map. All of this linking was straightforward and required no knowledge of HTML. The resulting document was published to HTML with the Trellix 2.0 "File/Publish to HTML" command. The HTML version was then examined in various browsers to check that we created all the links correctly, and then moved to the server using Microsoft FrontPage.