Best practice for technical documentation page length on a website?

[procrastiwriter <procrastiwriter -at- googlemail -dot- com>]

I'm looking for some advice with something I've been pondering for a while.
I'm working for a company where all documentation was transferred from CHM
files, to a website - I joined just as the migration happened.

Within the original CHM files, the tendency was to have a fairly 'deep'
table of contents and often lots of relatively short pages within each
section. This same structure was transferred to the website.

Understandably, some people are complaining that it takes too long to drill
down and find information, and I agree that many of the sections could be
combined into a single page (many pages are no more than a paragraph long).
I'm comfortable with this, but in the back of my mind I have the words of a
web developer ringing in my ears from years ago - "web users don't like
scrolling, pages should be short and snappy".

Now, this was some time ago, and I suspect that attitudes have changed,
particularly with the advent of wikis, etc. I also feel that there is a
significant difference between writing "short, snappy" pages for a standard
website, and writing pages that contain technical documentation.

I will obviously seek the views of people who use the documentation before I
make major changes, but I'm just wondering if anyone is aware of a 'best
practice' for this. What would you do if you had six separate pages of
technical documentation that could (logically) be combined into one, long
web page that would require multiple scrolls to read?

Thanks in advance.

P.
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