I've had to deal with this problem as documents I'm responsible for
maintaining have gotten large and unwieldy. I've found that people do
prefer multipart documents, with one exception -- single, monolithic documents
are preferred by those who want to be able make a copy of the document for
reference, or to print it.
My stab at solving this problem was to write a Perl script which could
generate one of two "views" of a document. One view is a multi-part view,
which different sections being in different documents, while the other is
the single-part view, with all sections in the same document.
The script is fairly primitive -- it only works well with a traditional
linear document (a tree one level deep). It uses the LINK "subdocument"
and "precedes" (? I'm reading mail offline currently, so please forgive me
if I get this wrong :) relationships to specify the tree, and generates
the appropriate HTML document. It is surprisingly useful, at least within
a limited range of documents.
The script -- and an example of its use -- is at
"http://www.willamette.edu/html-composition/multiview/". As yet, there
remains no write-up of how the script works, largely because I haven't had
the time to write one up yet. Maybe in August :).
Cheers,
-et