This really seems like the “age-old” fight between print designers and web designers.
A phonebook is a static medium where the only interaction between the “user” and the medium is the flipping of pages and the reading of text.
The phonebook entries are sorted and categorized so it is easy to find the information your are looking for. A phonebook is easy because it’s entire contents are (usually) in one large volume, right in front of you.
Thumbing through a phonebook is a LOT faster than clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking through multiple pages of information on a web site. Can you imagine if you had a database of a phone book and then just dumped it’s entire contents to someone’s browser, forcing the user to scroll, scroll, scroll page after page, trying to duplicate the functionality of your thumb on a book?
When you have an interactive site, where information is contained in a database or on some other site, you need to have a more sophisticated way of searching for and retrieving data.
So Tufte doesn’t like navigation bars, but wants choices. Choices of what? Navigational aids are nice because:
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If a user is “scanning” text on a page, they will know pretty quickly if what they are looking at is what they want.
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Why force them to continue to read or scan to look for navigation to take them somewhere else?
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If you have well thought-out and executed navigational aids, a user can use that navigation to help find their information much quicker.