By Janus Boye
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 feature was lost along the way 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
The Internet was invented in the late 60’s and the web, proposed in 1989, came out with the first server in 1991. So in this period, as Steven called post-Internet and pre-Web, there was FTP, the File Transfer Protocol. It was really a primitive method of serving documents to others and you downloaded the file to your computer before using it.
There was also email and chat programs, although very far from the widespread adoption and user interfaces we know today. Most of it was happening on high-end computers or on personal computers, but there were also several research groups experimenting with hypertext systems, but not yet connecting to the internet.
As the World Wide Web came out, one of the clever things about the web was including existing methods of delivering documents, like FTP, in the repertoire of access mechanisms, which meant that you could build a website with existing content really quickly. And, the other clever thing of course was making it free.
Early content authoring on the Web
In the very early days of the Web, there were three design decisions that impacted content authoring:
Characters: The Web was advanced for the time, using the 256 characters of Latin1 instead of just the 128 of ASCII (email and DNS only used ASCII). At last you could use accented letters! Unicode wasn't there yet, the first draft being published in 1991, with 65,000 code points. Today there are more than a million.
Documents: HTML was also advanced for the time, being principally a document description language: it had little to do with presentation (browser manufacturers didn't understand this). Bear in mind that the original HTML didn't support embedded images, and there was little to no control over presentation.
Presentation: After the addition of images and tables to HTML, they were (incorrectly) used as methods of presentation, with spacer images, and tables used for positioning. Browser makers also started incorrectly adding presentation elements to HTML. So more or less the first effort of W3C was to introduce style sheets, in the form of CSS, in order to protect HTML, and make presentation easier (since you didn't have to touch the content). Netscape was opposed to stylesheets, but Microsoft saw it as a way of getting its foot in the door, after its initial rejection of the internet.
The read-write web
As mentioned earlier, another design decision from the beginning was that the web was read-write: early browsers could edit as well as display pages.
One example of this is Amaya, a W3C sponsored tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment following the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.
Work on Amaya started at W3C in 1996 to showcase Web technologies in a fully-featured Web client and the open source project had its last release in 2012. Modern web browsers have integrated many of the features and standards that were once unique to Amaya, but the read-write feature was never adopted.
Keep also in mind, that there were no web content-management systems until about year 2000: You had to either author everything by hand, or devise something yourself. To manage one of the first magazines to publish online in 1995, Steven devised a content-management system using the Unix make facility. Read more about this in his page on Management of a Large Website with Make.
A mixed bag for Web content authoring today
For more on the troubles with HTML, read this 2016 interview with Steven Pemberton:
We wanted cat videos — so we got HTML5
Wrapping up his talk, Steven highlighted some of the big errors made by the designers of HTML5, the latest version of the standard behind the Web which came out as a formal recommendation in 2014.
Among the big mistakes in Steven’s view is that if you need new functionality, you can add it with Javascript and as a result we now have many frameworks. This means that content is less sustainable in the long term since it depends on the Javascript implementation and there are now 20 different versions of HTML, each single-sourced, and non-standardised.
This means you are locked in: If you want to use a different framework, you have to rewrite your whole website. There is no standardisation any more. It also means that most sites you see these days use mostly <div> and <span> and little else.
To quote Steven:
The early web was a simpler, easier place, but with less support, and browser makers muddying the water. Now, much more is possible, but the browser makers have messed it up again.
His dream for the future is the design of the web going back to we the users, not the browsers, and the web becoming a truly distributed space, not owned by big companies.
As he said in closing:
Content management will always be needed, but it can, with the right design, be easier than what we have today.
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.