"Austin, Darrel" wrote:
> > Format > > matters to writers, it informs the writing process and serves as the > > "rules of the road" they must follow in structuring their text and > > communication agenda. > > Is it format or media that matters? When working at the paper, every story > was done in a word document. Completely out of context from the final > printed paper. This didn't seem to hinder the writing process. > > I think knowing the media is important. Ie, you write differently for > newspapers than for radio...but that is simply different content. If you are > writing for radio, you don't necessarily need to know who's doing the > voiceover. If you are writing for newspaper, you don't necessarily have to > known the column width or type size (though cahracter count might be an > issue...) [snip for length] > > Even in the newspaper example cited below, journalists have some > > foresight into how their end editorial product will appear as in > > "Johnson, I need 1,000 words on the trial down at the courthouse and > > give me a sidebar on who the players are." Even that minimal amount of > > "presentation" information is critical in helping them structure their > > copy accordingly. > > It doesn't really effect structure...just the amount of content needed: A > story of a certain length and a related story of a certain length. > > I agree that the author needs to know a minimum to ideally craft the content > for the medium, but beyond that, I think any direct attemt at correlating > content with presentation at the authoring point isn't necessary and, at > times, can be a detriment. I'd like to play devil's advocate here. One of the intrinsically different things about presentation on the web -- to say nothing about alternative formats like WAP -- is that you have no idea what the physical presentation parameters are going to be. To give an example of the difference, above mentioned hypothetical journalist knows that his 1,000 word article is going to flowed into one-column wide space. Think that doesn't change the content? On the contrary -- narrower text spaces essentially require shorter paragraphs for readability. The same content on a screen-wide browser window looks ridiculous. For that matter, consider a cleverness I have detected on salon.com. Since they break their articles across pages, some of their writers build up to a "cliff-hanger" comment at the bottom of one page, to get the reader to click-through to the next section of story. If an author cannot anticipate where that break will fall, how can he utilize it? You use the example of radio. How about the example of a "movie". A movie designed for broadcast TV is designed *differently* than one for the big screen, if only to adjust pacing to accommodate commercial breaks, and adjust cinematography to accommodate the different aspect ratio. Should makers of cinema films break their content into small chunks easily digested by broadcast TV, knowing that their film might be aired that way? If content is divorced from format, how can you anticipate and accommodate the medium? You argue that one shouldn't. I certainly know why -- I am a developer, after all, and am inclined to feel likewise. But my understanding of the craft of writing (I presume there are analogs in graphical design) says that *is* a part of the craft, and not to be sacrificed in the name of "flexibility". As a programmer, I too fancy thinking of text as interchangeable cogs. Yet.... those CMS implementations I have observed which conscientiously structured document sub-assets to permit the re-purposing of text, were *not* used for such. The authors and editors insisted, no, in this other context, new content had to be generated, appropriate to the context. (I have in mind a particular VSS implementation I worked with/on for a company that shall remain nameless. Every article had to be lumped into standardized sections (different article types had different standard sections). Each section of each document was stored as its own asset/record. And *not once* in the history of that system had any section of a document been reused in another document, or elsewhere in the site. Well, not deliberately. Accidents happened. There were only several hundred sections titled "Conclusions" in the system -- it was a very simple mistake to accidentally assign the wrong "Conclusion" section to a document. But I digress.) Might it not be more appropriate to think of the internet not as "a medium", but as "a proliferation of media". To expect internet content to be independent of individual internet media, and equally available and appropriate to all media which constitute the internet is like expecting all content transmitted via electromagnetic radiation to work equally well on both TV and radio. -- Vanessa Layne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web Toolsmith TERC * 2069 Massachusetts Ave. * Cambridge, MA * 617 547-0430 -- http://cms-list.org/ more signal, less noise.
