Hi Darrel,
I think you get a better idea of the problem when you see different types
of users play with the system. We deal a lot with a sales company based
here in Montreal. They are all "sales guys". They consider themselves
"visual" even though what they produce hurts my eyes. Even though we have a
nice little WYSIWYG editor that automatically adopts the CSS of the site,
they complain about the fact that it doesn't properly display the width of
the final output. They edit large blocks of texts but when they click
preview, it suddenly gets squeezed into a narrow column and then scrolls for
several pages on end. To them, knowing where the line wraps is important.
They almost base their content's structure on it. Now I completely disagree
with the approach but the client is always right, right? The solution is
our preview edit mode for inline editing. And to be quite honest, it has
become a very popular feature. I don't think we can ever really get away
from "visual" editing but that doesn't bother me as long as what's produced
is structured. We can still take the inline edited content and spit it out
with a different css on a different publication.
a.
André Milton
www.mlore.com
-----Original Message-----
Behalf Of Austin, Darrel
> Totally agree that users can have lots of difficulty when
> presented with
> Content
> Wysiwyg pages that allow the user to "get the feel" of what
> he is entering
> or creating is the real requirement.
Is this an issue of human nature, or simply learned behavior?
I agree that content should be content...devoid of any specific presentation
initially. I also agree that many content authors have trouble grasping
that.
So, I guess is more of a theoretical type question: why is that?
Is it that content authors aren't properly acquainted with the new concept
of content autonomy?
Is it a remnant of our past (ie, we are used to paper documents)?
Is it only natural behavior to want to build a 'page' vs. content?
I've worked at newspapers before and that was the closest I had come to 'raw
content' and it didn't seem to be overly difficult for anyone to understand.
Writers wrote simple text devoid of presentation. Copysetters did the
presentation and layout.
In an office environment, it's different, of course, but I'd like to throw
out the argument that having authors fully understand the concept of
seperating their content completely from any presentational structure is a
critical concept to grasp for the content management system/process to work
properly.
Thoughts?
-Darrel
--
http://cms-list.org/
more signal, less noise.
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http://cms-list.org/
more signal, less noise.
