Content Authoring vs Site Design

I’ve come to realize that there is a world of difference between requirements for content authoring and requirements for site design. This really becomes clear when I look at the different view points between myself (The Challenge Of Intuitive WYSIWYG HTML) and Alastair (This Is What You See, This Is What You Get and now Responding to Adrian) regarding WYSIWYG editing. (Snide comment: see, I can use cite and emphasis too).

Essentially, I see two very different set of use cases for HTML – both visible right here on this blog (you may need to leave the comfort of your RSS reader for this demonstration). The first use case is site design. In site design, you care very much about how things look – you want to know that it will look good everywhere (not necessarily identical, but probably very close). You want to be able to do fancy things with CSS like absolute positioning and floating divs and images. You want full control over how things will be laid out and how they will look. In this mode, I personally don’t use a WYSIWYG editor, I write the HTML and CSS by hand and tweak it until it looks just right. This site design was created by hand and in theory it looks pretty everywhere (in practice it looks pretty in any modern browser and should degrade fairly gracefully in really old browsers – sadly it’s pretty awful on mobile phones as I gave up fighting to get IE to render the CSS accurately).

The other mode is content authoring. This is where you author content without any great concern for how it looks – like writing a blog post. That’s not to say you don’t care how it looks at all, but your primary focus is on creating the content, not formatting it. Perhaps surprisingly this is where a WYSIWYG editor is best applied. There is almost always some kind of formatting that needs to be applied to the generated content so the WYSIWYG editor provides a simple, intuitive method of applying this that lets the user concentrate on creating content instead of on what the exact syntax for making something bold is. Site designers and HTML purists wish that the average user thought of this as a need for semantic markup instead of formatting but they don’t. A WYSIWYG editor can help to a degree here too, by applying the em tag instead of the i tag the markup is more semantic than if the average user who has been forced to learn HTML had blindly applied the i tag. There are other possibilities too, by making it easy to see and apply CSS classes, users are encouraged to use semantic markup instead of recreating the formatting. Taking that a step further, you could remove things like the font face and size controls and only allow the user to apply CSS classes and semantic tags.

The key thing in content authoring is that it has to be easy for the user to create the content, recognizing that the user is an expert in their area and not necessarily in HTML or technology in general. By making it simple for them to contribute content you get a chance to capture parts of their knowledge and share that knowledge. If the generated HTML is perfectly semantic it’s a bonus, the most important thing is to capture the information in the first place – having formatting mixed with content is better than having no content at all.

My writing is almost always from a content authoring perspective and not a site design perspective. That’s because I work in the content management industry where the most common task is creating content with little to no formatting and even less need for semantic markup. In this area, WYSIWYG editors are an essential requirement simply to encourage the creation of content – forcing users to learn any markup language is a barrier to entry that is likely to severely limit adoption of the content management system (see Wiki Syntax Considered Harmful).

I’ll try and actually address Alistair’s latest post sometime soon, it’s bedtime for now.