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suffer the failings of the “if you build it will they come” syndrome of the web -- in
these cases there is a captive audience.
Content isn’t what it used to be
Content is a word that became commonplace with the birth and growth of the
World Wide Web. It refers to the text, graphics and multi-media that appear on
web pages. In the last decade virtually all web content was created using the
HTML standard and was designed and published as pages for the browser on a
PC. Content on the Next Generation Internet needs to be highly adaptive; i.e.
Intelligent. New interfaces and devices are emerging, the diversity of users is
increasing, machines are acting more and more on users' behalf, and web
activities are reaching a wide range of business, leisure, education, and research
activities. Web pages that are “one size (for the PC) fits all” will no longer be
adequate. We need to be thinking of web content in a much different way.
To achieve maximum flexibility and reuse, web pages need to be decomposed
into the components that make up the pages or “fragments”. Fragments may
include banners at the top of a web page, navigation menus, “boilerplate” legal
notices, graphical buttons, images, and pieces of text that collectively represent
the page. The fragments can then be recombined and rendered appropriately for
the user, task, or context. For example when I go to weather.com to check
today’s forecast I see a beautifully formatted page that contains a weather map
of the entire country plus colorful icons representing clouds, rain, snow, and
thunderbolts. If I happen to be receiving weather forecast on a mobile phone or
Palm Pilot I don’t have the “real estate” to display all of this content. What I really
want to see are fewer content fragments - just the temperature and the odds of
rain or snow - laid out appropriately for my small display.
A prototype content management system developed at IBM, Franklin, makes the
management of fragments possible. It provides an end-to-end process; from
content creation and reuse to quality assurance and publishing to multiple
devices. Content is broken down to fragments, and the responsibility for
managing the fragments is assigned to different experts. The graphic designer
produces the buttons, icons and images. The product manager maintains the
product descriptions and pricing. The legal department is responsible for the
terms and conditions. When creating a product promotion, the web editor only
writes any new text and simply points to the fragments already created by the
experts.
An important aspect of content management is the separation of content and
style. The XML standard enables this: each fragment of a web page is an XML
document tagged with descriptors. A descriptor might tell whether the fragment is
a banner, price table or product description, or state its target audience or
expiration time. The content management software then uses “style sheets” that
lay out the right content for each device. As a result, the end user sees the
appropriate content and layout for the device they are using, be it a huge video
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