Making web content management work

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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