People seem generally good with context in this sort of thing, though. The grey areas where offense occurs are ones that have always been there between the business/advertising side and the editorial/creative side, wherever they are glued together in a common purpose.
I think it also reflects how upside down our world of online publishing has gotten. Print is designed after the content, be it story or a catalog or a newspaper. Online, though, we are often forced to design the shop or the blog with dummy content, and face the wrath of the client when they themselves cannot deliver the content (product details are missing or longer than the space provided is a common problem). Seeing the usage of the word ācontentā merely from the artistic side ignores all of the cases where content really is dynamic, such as weather reports, travel planners, live sports play by plays, web shops, etc.
I donāt know if this adds to the discussion or not, but maybe I can give a point of view thatās a little different on what the word content means to developers instead of its normal usage.
A few years ago I worked with a very large ācontent managementā software company. Iād never heard the term before. I had done some website design on a small scale but never worked on these huge websites, which are programmed in a very different way from the little 20, 40, 60 page websites that Iād put together in Dreamweaver or hand coded in HTML.
The company I worked for, Fatwire (now owned by Oracle), created a program that was used by companies like Walmart, GM, Ford, many very large banks, Best Buy, the NYTimes. So, GIANT websites.
Just to give you an idea of how big these sites are, in order to be qualified to purchase this software, you had to have a minimum of 60 programmers. The sales people wouldnāt even consider selling this product to you if you did not have 60 programmers on staff just for the content management - so, probably there would be another 60 people dedicated to the shopping cart software and another 60 people who programmed the look and feel of the website and another 60 on the databases of products. Image 500 people working on a website at the same time - these are not the sort of websites that I was building in Dreamweaver by a long shot.
The NYTimes is a good example of how this software works. Letās say Iām a reporter. I really need a simple way to upload a story, so the programmers use this software to create a form with fields like Byline, Headline, Text, Keywords, etc. The reporter enters all their stuff in, presses a button and uploads it. Then that form feeds to a supervisor who sees a different version of the form with maybe stuff like Release Date and Time, Content Checked for Spelling, Content Checked for Accuracy, and some such. That form feeds up the chain until somewhere there is a guy or gal who is in charge of releasing all of the final stories to the live website.
The live website DOES NOT exist anywhere as you view it in your browser. Itās weird if you have programmed a little webpage where you can toggle between the code and the āweb viewā to wrap your head around how these sites exist. They are just pieces of code (āassetsā in programming speak) that at any given minute are in flux as programmers upload new style information or content managers upload new stories or shopping cart people add some new feature. There is never a moment where the website achieves some kind of stable state. All these little bits and pieces of code get cobbled together by your browser into the final product you view. There is no final āpageā anywhere on the web server for the NYTimes.
THIS is what programmers mean by ācontentā being separated from ādesign.ā Not that the NYTimes designers donāt try to design their website to display news in a way that is engaging or appropriate for the kinds of information that they display, but that the content is handled differently in the program from the code that tells your browser how it looks and how the buttons work.
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Interesting thought. I often regard information at work as content and spend inordinate amounts of time turning it into powerpoint presentations to convince someone to do something. Personally I would like to think that the content is enough on its own. However the modern infantile manager wants it pre digested and shorn of irrelevant detail. So the medium becomes the message. Only graphs with slopes going in the right direction are of interest.
Yup.
In the web world we take content and form and create something as a whole - the end result is a āproductā in itself, but itās still the SUM of content, interface and function. Thereās no escaping that, but then it isnāt a problem anyway.
If anything the distinction is becoming more clear with positive trends in removing the device from the equation. You gave a great example with ebooks, but this factors into everything on the web - BB is a good example (ironically) - the āformā is different on a desktop and a mobile, but the content remains the same, the content shouldnāt change to meet the design, the two are separate parts of the same whole; one is there to facilitate the other.
Creating a unified āexperienceā works on something like a marketing site for beer, but not so much for anything ācontent-drivenā (these words have uses). I also donāt see how this compares to media like film, if Iām honest, itās apples and pears. Websites are generally created specifically to HOUSE content, films arenāt created to house a story, they ARE the story. A better comparison would be websites to cinemas, and the film itself acting as the content.
Some people just think too much about problems that donāt exist.
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