Information Research Weblog

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)