By Janus Boye
DRAFT - WORK IN PROGRESS
With the arrival of Greg Dunlap's recent book on 'Designing Content Authoring Experiences', we are seeing a renewed interest in actually improving the experience for those authors, editors, marketers and others working with content.
As you know, the World Wide Web is based on a markup language called HTML, but perhaps you didn't know that in the early days of the Web, browsers were actually not read-only. If you had permissions, you could edit directly in the browser. That got lost and many years later, you have to log into a CMS, navigate to the content item, make your changes, click publish and wait.
In a recent members' call, we were joined by Web pioneer Steven Pemberton, who talked about the very early days of web content authoring. Steven was one of the first handful of people on the European Internet in 1988; he has been involved with the web since its beginning, organising two workshops at the first web conference in 1994, and has been chair of several working groups at W3C
In the spirit of the famous quote by American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan:
"You have to know the past to understand the present”
What might we learn from the early days to make things better in the future? Steven took us through his journey and we started just before the arrival of the Web.
Content authoring before the Web
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Early content authoring on the Web
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The read-write web
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A mixed bag for Web content authoring today
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design errors in HTML 5
Web has become far more centralized instead of distributed…
Learn more about Web content authoring
You can find the HTML-based slides that Steven used here: Web Content Authoring. As he mentioned, they were authored in the now discontinued Amaya browser and web editor.
Here’s a few more posts on the topic:
Content Production: The Next Wave for Digital Experience Platforms, which I wrote and had published on CMS Critic back in November 2023.
Empowering editors to design their best content with Emma Horrell from University of Edinburgh, also from late 2023.
Designing Content Authoring Experiences That Editors Don’t Hate by Greg from September 2023.
The First 85%, a post by Deane Barker from 2006 (!) on how no one actually opens a content management system and tries to enter any content until about 85% along in the entire process.
You can meet Greg Dunlap in person at the CMS Connect 25 conference in Montreal in August. The conversation on content authoring experiences naturally also continues in our peer groups in Europe and North America.
Finally, you can also lean back and enjoy the entire recording below.