elpicoroco@jonctions - Constant

DEF>VJ9 publication 26-07-2006 17:50 Pagina 102
VJ9
102
In conversation with web standards
Same content, different message
interdependent documents, is a core principle of web standards. It
makes it technically possible to change one of the two without having
to touch the other. Now it is perfectly easy to alternate between different
looks of a page without touching the HTML code. Not only that,
because “content” is liberated from specific medium, “content” can
theoretically travel to other devices or media, even to ones that have
not been invented yet.
[Zen Garden examples]
What this banal set of examples shows, is that the division between
“content” and form is in fact quite artificial. For the sake of convenience,
“content” has been restricted to text whereas images, typography,
behavioral scripts, colour, contrast and lay-out are not. At the
same time a texts’ structure (which parts are selected and how are they
broken up in paragraphs, headers and sections) has become locked
inside “content” (as well as punctuation, tone, grammar and language,
but lets not complicate things too much). After being separated from
each other, both parts can be replaced at will.
[examples: use form]
In the meticulous documentation of discussions at the WC3 that led
to the development of standards, I have found no explanation for the
choice of the term “substance” or it’s later equivalent “content”, or
even more outrageous “meaning”. The colonization of these terms is
understandable from the bureaucratic culture of the WC3 and the division
is probably based on a pragmatic reading of properties, but still.
Most web pages that are published now, are dynamically generated. In
fact, “content” can be as easily interchanged, as a stylesheet. With the
help of a content management system (weblog software for example),
HTML pages are built around text and images retrieved from a database.
The design work to be done is to determine what happens to each
element appearing on a web page.
But whereas in traditional page or print design, decisions can be
made about precisely “placing” specific texts and images in relation to
each other, in the case of dynamically generated pages, design decisions
are based on a global sense of the nature and format of the data
that will appear in a box, as header or as image. Stylesheets make this
work efficient; they clarify the division of labour between programmers
and designers, while still offering many possibilities to play with
what the database spits out.
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