Printed book idioms to be avoided on screen
1. Breaking an article into multiple pages.
Page is a physical limitation of a paper medium. Sometimes the text does not fit and you have to drop the last paragraph on another page. On the screen you have plenty of vertical space and there is no excuse to cut the reader’s context.
2. A lot of iPad newspaper apps simulate multi-column layout. They shouldn’t.
The purpose of a multi-column layout is to make articles’ layout more flexible on a big newspaper page. On a wide page you can fit a couple of articles and an ad. But the screen is not that wide.
Narrow columns also require small font size, which is a problem on a display of a resolution under 300 dpi.
Narrow columns require manually-tuned hyphenation and sometimes font width-adjustment. It is a requirement for the books as well, but a more narrow column looks even worse. Unfortunately, it is not the case for the digital media today.
If the column does not fit the screen, you constantly have to scroll down and up when reading a page: down when finishing the first column and up to proceed to the next one.
You can scroll and zoom the page on screen. If you make a single scrollable and zoomable column, you don’t need to provide font size control or worry about how much of content is visible. The reader can choose the more comfortable size of the page for herself.
3. A lot of people use footnotes on the web. This is horrendous: you have to leave the current line and scroll down. And even if you scroll by clicking a footnote number, you then have to scroll back. And even if you have a link from the footnote back (like in a wikipedia article), browser doesn’t scroll exactly to the position at which you were before.
On the screen you have a plenty of vertical space. And if you don’t use multiple columns (which you should not), you have some space on the side. That means, you may put some notes in the block of smaller font right below the paragraph, or on the side.
Summary
Do not break articles in pages. Do not break text in the columns. Make text column scrollable and zoomable. Make the footnotes immediately under the paragraph, or put them on the side.