GearBits

Making (and Keeping) Web Publishing a Simple Task

The same trend seems to happen again and again: something useful starts out very simply. It becomes widely adopted, feature-creep begins to set in, and suddenly it is no longer nearly as simple. It may still be as useful, but it's no longer nearly as usable to the general public.

I'm scared that this is happening in web publishing. In the early years of HTML, using it was fairly simple. You had a handful of tags that you used to literally mark up your text. You could embed images and make rudimentary tables, but really fancy stuff was just out of reach.

Here we are now 10 years later (well, 10 years after I first started using HTML) and I've noticed two things. First, making a webpage is more confusing and complicated than ever before, and the trend is increasingly moving towards even greater complexity. While the old physical layout tags (e.g., <b> for bold) are still supported, there are those who would have them permanently deprecated and eliminated from use (i.e., no longer supported as renderable tags by browsers). What would be left in its stead would be a set of style sheets (CSS) and other techniques that are magnitudes more complex.

A second trend is that more and more people are wanting to web-ify their content. However, even the simple task of making something a hyperlink escapes a lot of adults I know (perhaps even most adults). This means that whenever something is to be created, they turn to the tool(s) with which they are most familiar, such as Microsoft Office applications (i.e., Word, Excel, etc). When Word and Excel "save as" HTML, they produce highly garbage-ified pages, full of stuff that doesn't render well in any browser except Interner Explorer. Obviously, this isn't an ideal situation when we want to advocate the use of the Internet and web content whenever appropriate.

So, what needs to be done? One thing we need to do is to ensure that simple markup continues to be acceptable by all browser and related technologies. When I use <b> in something, it should make the text bold...period. I really don't care how distasteful that rule is to the design/layout purists. The simple fact is that most people won't ever know more than a handful of HTML codes, so making those most important ones as simple as possible is important.

Another thing we need to do is to try to make our content production and handling applications more directly tied into the Internet paradigm. For example, if someone wants to type up a series of Q&A, a really useful macro in the word processing program would be to FAQ-ize it -- turn it into the standard FAQ format (one webpage with questions at the top, each hyperlinked to the corresponding answer at the bottom). The output should contain as little HTML and other markup/code as is barely needed to make it compliant with the web content standard. Alternately, if the current web content standard has grown beyond a reasonably manageable level of simplicity, then forget that and just put use the fewest tags possible.

An alternative to both these is to do away with markup altogether and devise a system that doesn't rely on altering content to be specially configured for use on the Internet. I haven't seen a good example of this type of approach yet, and frankly I'm not sure it could exist.

I apologize if I sound grumpy. It's just that I would hate to see this trend towards increased complexity shut out the majority of the workforce from being able to produce useful and efficient web content. We could start relying on other tools to produce our HTML for us (e.g., Microsoft Word), but I fear that the companies behind those tools would start pushing their own agendas by producing modified HTML that creates incompatibilities (some have been doing that for a while now). Alternately, we could start a movement back to bare-bones HTML for those who aren't concerned with being on the cutting edge and put significant effort into getting everyone familiar with the handful of tags they need to produce useful, efficient content. Or, is there another option that I'm leaving out?