[Sigia-l] Categorization/Classification vs. "Headlines"

[MJJAIXEN at up.com]

I'm currently having a mild argument (not quite a full blown holy war) with
our designers over how we want to automate our index pages, especially when
it comes to categorized content.  Perhaps someone has some perspective or
some experience to lend here.

We are working with our IT group to develop a way to automate the
maintenance of our index pages with our content management system.  When
content is added, the editor will be asked to categorize the content in a
content hierarchy.  (Eventually, I hope these hierarchies can be supported
with multiple facets, but that's another battle for another day.)   My
intention is that each category will have it's own sub-index page.   Each
index page (and sub-index page as well) would list all of the content items
in the current category, as well as all of the subcategories of that
category.  In addition, each subcategory would also show all of the content
items in that subcategory and the sub-categories of that sub-category.  In
essence, you would see 2 levels of the current hierarchy on any index page.

An example would be an organization like this
* Introduction page
* Chapter 1
   * Section A
   * Section B
* Chapter 2
   * Section C
   * Section D
   * Section E
   * Page X
   * Page Y

Click on "Chapter 2", and it would take you to a page with links like this:
Chapter 2
* Section C
   * First Page
   * Another Page
   * Yet Another Page
* Section D
   * More Stuff
   * Even More Stuff
 * Section E
   * Finally, important stuff
   * And even more important stuff
* Page X
* Page Y

The design staff seems to think that this is fine when you have a deep
organization structure, but not when it's not deep.  When you only have a
list of a few links, they would like to classify the links, but not create
sub-category index pages.  For example, if you have 10 content items in a
section of the web site, and were to categorize those links into 3
categories, they don't want to have those 3 category index pages.  They say
they'd like to be able to "classify" links without having to "categorize"
those links.  Which is where my confusion and frustration ensues.

Their arguments center on:
1)  It's not necessary to create the sub-index pages.
2)  It's confusing to the user to give each category a sub-index page that
merely lists the links that are listed on the higher level index page.  It
makes them think that there is something more on that category than is
shown on the higher level page.
3)  It lengthens the URL, since the classification scheme will be also
reflected in the URL space.

My counter-arguments are:
1)  Since we are automating the creation and maintenance of these pages,
it's easier to create these pages than it is to create exception cases
around using these pages.
2)  By always creating these sub-index pages, we are ensuring the
consistency of our site - especially if the content expands down the line
and the categorization increases.
3)  If we really have a business need for this, we could either (a)
manually maintain those pages (probably best if there are only a few
exceptions and the content doesn't change much) or (b) change the
presentation design of those specific templates and make the sub-index
pages unlinked.
4)  This shouldn't make or break the length of our URL's; we probably need
to look at our URL scheme anyway if this is a big problem.

Mike Jaixen
Union Pacific