Standards, Semantic Markup, Distributed Authorship and Knowledge Management

July 30, 2003 | 3 Comments

I’m currently working on rebuilding some Intranet templates with valid, tableless, Web standard, semantic markup that will hopefully be populated with valid, Web standard, semantically marked-up content.  Since the organization has chosen to go with Microsoft technologies for the most part and our standard browser is IE 5.5 one might wonder — why bother?

I could tell you that it’s anticipation of future browser releases or for cross-browser compatibility, but it should be fairly obvious that for various reasons, this Intranet is going to be viewed for the foreseeable future with Redmond colored glasses circa 1999.

I could tell you that it’s just plain easier to develop this way, but depending on you experience with CSS and XHTML, this might not be the case.  For me I’ve come to find that dealing with CSS quirks, hacks and work arounds are much easier than dealing with the old nested tables and inline presentational code I used to deal with a few years back.

The above are very true and are usually good reasons for going with a semantic Web standard approach, but in this case I see the real benefit to be more in the court of the organization as a whole.  By choosing a Web standard route I can roll out clean, easy to maintain pages that will make a push toward distributed authorship easier and in the long run set the organization up on the right track for better knowledge management.

Distributed Authorship

One of the main technical issues with implementation of a Content Management System is the inability of authors and contributors to style their content and the quality of code that the CMS produces.  Once you hand the responsibility of content maintenance and creation off to those authors it’s out of your hands, baring a usually complicated and often under utilized review process that would, in many cases, defeat the purpose of distributed authorship in the first place.  In other words, as soon as they want to do something besides change a phone number they’re calling you again.

If you’re lucky and they can make changes with out too much fuss, chances are they are going to be cutting and pasting text, tables and images in and out of programs like Word, Excel and from existing Web pages.  At the least this creates a mish-mash of bad code that at some point someone will have to clean, again defeating the purpose to an extent.  At worst it breaks pages, again causing the phone to ring and you to be brought into the maintenance loop again.

A good way to limit this is to produce a style guide that limits the kinds of formatting a content owner can do.  Obviously this is a must, but lets take it a step further.  If you code your pages semantically, and with Web standard markup controlled by an external stylesheet, you can not only drastically simplify your style guide but you can enforce those standards easier and at the same time help keep your CMS from spreading bad code.

This option could also limit the need of a CMS entirely.  As I’ve yet to hear of one that is anywhere worth the money, time and effort to utilize, you can understand how I feel this might be a great way for some to go.

XHTML is, at it’s most basic, much simpler and easier to learn that traditional HTML 4.0.  With a simple style guide, standard markup and CSS styles you can accomplish almost all the formatting a content author would need, just by knowing a handful of markup tags.  Instead of trusting the CMS to sort out code from Word, for example, you can hand a content owner a cheat sheet with the basic tags outlined and trust that they can code their own content.  I mean, really, how hard is is to learn 10 or so tags?  Team this technique with a tool like Contribute and you’ve got a nice, simple and cheap process that, while doesn’t store you content in a database, keeps it in a clean, standard form you can repurpose down the road.

This also, maybe more importantly, gives the content owners they control they ultimately and frees up the Web folks to tackle the more important things.

Knowledge Management and The Future

By moving all of your content, either via the content owners or some other method, you can also get your organization ready for anything the future brings.  XHTML is a subset of XML and a semantically marked up piece of content will play nice with any technology that comes around the corner.  It makes sense in of itself, especially when you are talking about content.  A header is a header, a paragraph is a paragraph and the list goes on.

Knowledge management is big, and having the flexibility to work with your content in many different situations can help get that ball rolling — so why not get your content ready now?  Stripping the content down to the bare minimum, in a form that is technology independent, will save time, effort and money in the future and make that content all that much more useful for whatever system you use.  If nothing else at least it’ll be clean.

More and more I come to realize that Web content extends beyond the browser.  Who knows what the future holds for Intranets and the Web.  I’ve thought on this a bit, and can see many organizations taking their Intranet content to a more application based model.  Having clean, semantically coded content is key in making this or any other transition smoothly.

Web standards can be much more than Web alone.  As the Web converges with other technologies the importance of standard, semantic markup becomes that much more important.

Filed under: Web General