The Future of Text

I'll keep it short this week because I want you to see this.

I stumbled upon this video on YouTube, somehow, and kept it because I love both the message and how it's delivered, in only four and a half minutes.

HTML underwent, or more properly is still undergoing, a sea-change in how Web pages are built starting about five years ago. Developers were fed up with all of the various browser hacks. Accessibility advocates were fed up that so much material was unavailable to differently-abled Web surfers and eCommerce types were upset that so many calories had to be devoted to Search Engine Optimization—gaming the system so your pages rank higher than mine.

Up until then, most books were filled with "tips" like You can use uppercased letters, lowercased letters, or both when making your tags. Most showed how to use various presentational tags, often even including proprietary presentational tags that were never a part of true HTML. It was rare that anyone explained how to double-quote attributes. And then, of course, there were all of the chapters on using tables for layout.

It wasn't that we didn't care, or that we were all jerks. It was that we didn't have any better tools at the time.

Today we have the tools, and we should use them whenever we can. They make our pages easier to render, easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier for search engines to catalog. Separate your content from your presentation and you can do all kinds of things. Continue to blend them and you are going to be severely limited in the not-too-distant future. Content is the message. It's the reason you need a Web page. It's the material that needs to be shared, distributed, archived. Presentation is how the message is delivered. What fonts, colors, sizes? Lots of room on the left side? Box around it all? Read aloud in a man's voice or a woman's? How should it look when printed on a page, should it even appear at all? All of this is presentation.

The first UNL.EDU Web pages were built before HTML v3.2 became the standard. HTML v3 was adopted, quickly morphed into v3.2 and then came HTML 4 and HTML v4.01. The current design uses XHTML v1. XHTML is HTML recast in the XML language, and XML is all about structure. It may be a while before our Web pages are entirely based in XML. But it should be pretty clear that that's the future. You might want to spend some time thinking about that.