MikePadgett.com

Managing content contributions or a migration process from an existing online resource requires patience and discipline, two things of which information designers can never have enough!

In few other situations do things get trickier than when an organisation wants to publish key messages and insists in a fit of decentralisation that its business units represent themselves in such a context.

Let’s assume we have developed a hierarchical information architecture. For the moment, though, it’s entirely empty. How do we describe each node properly in content?

Guiding principles

When deciding on what needs to be communicated by new content or through testing the relevance of old content within a new structure, we can use two time-honoured principles from centuries past:

a. Occam’s Razor

William of Ockham was not actually the inventor of the Razor, but the Friar from Sussex has always been the popular source when referring to the maxim that:

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity

b. (A paraphrasing of) Bentham’s utilitarianism

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the context of content:

Deliver the greatest amount of satisfaction to the greatest number of users

Along with his influential theory of utilitarianism, reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham can also be credited with the inspiration for the modern prison through his Panopticon.

The questions

Accordingly, these principles require us to describing and explaining a node, we satisfy only the following questions, concisely and in the precise order:

1. What?
2. Why?
3. How?
4. Who? and optionally,
5. [When? If the node is axiomatically subject to a period of time]

The content should respond to the above and nothing more, otherwise it has exceeded the remit of its purpose to describe the node.

The content should then provide users with access to:

• The next sibling element;
• Thematically-aligned elements;
• The immediate parent;
• The root element

If these criteria are satisfied, the node is properly described and explained.

Microsoft’s Office Sharepoint Server 2007 clears up some problems with cosmetic improvements, but delivers enough new ones out-of-the-box to remain beyond the reach of assistive technology users. Significant development will be necessary to ensure a basic level of accessibility.
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If you’ve spent time designing and building usable, accessible web pages to hand over to developers, you probably have to resist the urge to stand over them while they’re at work.

Assuming you pick up on every little issue, you’re justifiably proud by the time release comes along.

Then, like a house of cards, your delicate, pristine code comes tumbling down when users start editing content.

I would chance to claim that the overwhelming majority of CMS products publish horrific, nay rude, HTML created in those oh-so-friendly WYSIWYG editors.

And when you fix some of the worst offenders in the source view, the Editor goes and validates against you and your well-meaning hard work.

It’s a problem to which today’s BBC News article alludes when discussing accessibility failures on government websites.

So to all those who strive for web standards, I say, make sure your CMS does too!

I’m currently two-thirds through Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards”.

It was published only a couple of years ago (a long time in Web world, of course) and it’s interesting to trace the arc of developments since then.

Whilst much of the methodology described in the book is becoming increasingly normal nowadays, I certainly wasn’t aware of the scale of Zeldman’s achievements with regard to ending the so-called Browser Wars with the Web Standards Project until now.

Web standards implementation as a strategy has exploded into the forefront of my job, so it is now important to put together a strong business case in order to get buy-in from developers and management. It is no longer enough, it seems, to encourage topical best practice from colleagues.

For many people I’m dealing with, the understanding of (X)HTML standards seems to be quite practical - “table avoidance” is one of the most visible concerns and, as Zeldman also points out, the problem of automatically generated code from content management applications.

Time will tell how far I can take it, especially for internal systems, but it looks set to be a pretty lonely path for now!