Towards Purer Content

 5th July 2021 at 1:36pm
Word Count: 223

The end-form of the content should dictate the style — visual style should not be baked into the content itself. The content should remain structured, yet style-less (WYSIWYM over WYSIWYG [What-you-see-is-what-you-mean instead of what-you-see-is-what-you-get]). Structure must be semantically implied with simple meta data added to content. This structured, un-styled, meta data rich content can then be fed to whatever service, tool, program, etc. required for the display type desired.

We are not yet in this perfect world.

The common tools we use are ill-suited for un-styled content creation. Word processors wrap text in formatting hard to remove for use in other contexts. Desktop publishing platforms lock content into layout files incompatible with other workflows. WYSIWYG tools bloat content with impure markup making content there hard to Reuse or migrate. This impure content withers and dies, chained into a file format, storage method, or self-imposed style prison.

This does not have to be the case.

Purer content is achievable. Pure Content is able to evolve and live in different templates, different places, and migrate seamlessly between different future-friendly formats. There are a variety of ways that content can better conform to an idealized “pure” form that is more flexible and more future friendly than current options …

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