By Michael Holley Swtpc6800 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo By Michael Holley Swtpc6800 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As the folks at CERN recently celebrated, it was twenty years ago that the core technologies and standards of the world wide web (including code for a web server and a line-mode client) were officially placed in the public domain. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, designed to enable researchers to share research documents across multiple computing platforms and formats, would quickly outgrow these academic beginnings to become a global force for business and social interaction.

It helps to remember this history, though, as we still struggle with one of the fundamental assumptions of early HTML (and its predecessor SGML):

Content has its own internal structure separate from the specific presentations which might be made of it.

This core notion of separation of content from presentation has been a challenge ever since. We just can’t seem to come to grips with the notion that the web is different than print, and that rather than trying to control the output across device types, contexts, and users, we ought to aim for flexibility. (In the 10 years between John Allsop’s The Dao of Web Design and Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design, the majority of the industry – with some notable exceptions –  largely fell back into a pattern of fixed page designs for the desktop browser).

Enter Content Strategy

While the approaches like progressive enhancement, adaptive web design, and responsive web design have helped the situation significantly, by helping realize the goal of flexible presentations rendering reasonably on various devices, form factors, and contexts, they only account for content presentation.

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The CMS Myth Hangout logo

This month is a busy one for the CMS Myth team — from Philadelphia to Chicago to Portland, the Mythbusters will be out in force! The CMS Myth will be represented at J. Boye, CMS Expo, Drupalcon, and WebVisions, as John mentioned last month.

I took a minute (forty, actually) to pick the brains of some of our favorite Mythbusters on where they’ll be, what they’ll be talking about, and what they’re looking forward to at the conferences they’re heading off to.  Check it out in the G+ Hangout below:

 

True, I won’t be out and about this month, but I’m eagerly awaiting my turn to get to Confab Minneapolis, which is just a month away! In the meantime, I’ll be brushing up on some new reading and continuing to head up the Team Content charge back in Beantown.

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CMS Real World Style at CMS Expo

In just a few weeks the CMS Myth will once again be attending, speaking at, and covering the CMS Expo in Evanston, IL. CMS Expo is a unique conference in a number of ways: Real world experience While other conferences give you talking heads, marketing department representatives, and sales pitches, CMS Expo focuses on real [...]

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A Wave to CMS Veteran David Aponovich

It’s been a big week in the CMS world with Forrester Research publishing its much-anticipated 2013 Forrester Wave for Web Content Management. This research report from the venerable Cambridge-MA headquartered think tank published every year or two can move markets, make (or break) vendor reputations, and inform the CMS short lists of the Fortune 1000 [...]

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April Showers Bring May Mythbusting?

Now that the Northeast is gradually thawing out from a belatedly snowy and cold winter, it’s time to start up the mythbuster van and get on the road. This May offers a number of opportunities to meet the mythbusters in person, and maybe even win some of the long-rumored CMS Myth apparel line. First up [...]

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Content that Does More

“What we need is not more content, but content that does more” In many ways the core challenge of the content management industry has always been the separation of presentation from content, to enable the re-presentation of content in multiple contexts and devices, to different audiences, and in different formats. But, as Deane Barker and [...]

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So you say you want a content management system…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of roles on a successful web content team again lately. However, unlike last year when I wrote this article about the various roles on the agency/integrator side…This time around I’m thinking more about long term content management roles on the client side. Specifically, how the lack of [...]

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The Oxymoron of Content Strategy

The other day, I had the opportunity to connect with Bob Johnson, Vice President and Principal Analyst at IDG Connect after attending a local SMEI Boston meeting. Years before “customer experience” became a household phrase, Bob was VP of the Customer Experience Practice at IDC, and before that VP of Sales Effectiveness at the META [...]

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The CMS Myth Team: Now on Google+

…And we’re live! In addition to blogging about content management the CMS Myth team can now periodically be found hosting hangouts on Google+. In this first episode Jeff Cram, John Eckman, Katie Del Angel, and Jake DiMare discuss a wide variety of CMS related topics including: The origins of the CMS Myth blog Goals for growing [...]

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Five (More) Content Management Blogs You Should Be Reading

Tom Wentworth published a great list yesterday of five content management blogs you should be reading.  We were honored to be included in such fantastic company that includes Deane Barker, Scott Liewhr, David Aponovich, Seth Gottlieb, and Dries Buytaert. Not to mention Tom himself who is a prolific blogger with decades of CMS wisdom to [...]

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