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Web Content

Right. Let's get this over with. You've stumbled upon an article that's a digital monument to mediocrity, flagged for containing "original research" and needing more citations than a doctoral thesis written in crayon. Apparently, explaining the very substance of the internet is a task that stumps most people. Don't worry, I'm here to fix it. Try to keep up.

Web content is the digital detritus you encounter online. It’s the text, the visual noise, the audio hiss—the very content that populates the vast, echoing halls of the internet. It is the reason you're here, the stuff you mindlessly consume as part of your daily digital experience on countless websites. This "content" can be anything and everything: the words on this page, the pixelated images of someone's lunch, the disembodied sounds and looping audio clips, the online videos of cats falling off furniture. It's all the material crammed, with varying degrees of competence, into the structure of web pages.

Users, such as yourself, connect their devices to this sprawling ecosystem of web content through the various, often convoluted, layers of the internet, hoping to find something—anything—of value.

Back when the digital world was slightly less of a chaotic landfill, two individuals named Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville attempted to define this primordial soup in their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. They wrote, with a quaint optimism that's almost painful to read now, "We define content broadly as 'the stuff in your website.' Web content may include webpage document pages, information, software data and applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web pages, archived e-mail messages stored on email servers, and more. And we include future web content as well as present web content roadmap." They were trying to map a wilderness, bless their hearts. They saw the potential for organized information; we got a global attic filled with junk.

Content management

As websites spiraled from simple digital brochures into monstrous, complex beasts, the desperate need for some semblance of order gave birth to the field of content management. Around the mid-1990s, "content management systems" (CMS) emerged, not as a brilliant innovation, but as a necessary evil—a digital leash to keep the sprawling chaos of a website from devouring itself. These systems are the technological equivalent of a stressed-out librarian trying to shelve an infinite number of books written in every language, including several that don't exist yet.

Effective content management within any organization that isn't a complete circus means establishing a hierarchy of roles. You have the content author, who creates the raw material; the editor, who cleans up the mess; the publisher, who pushes it out into the world; and the administrator, who oversees the whole teetering structure. This isn't just about people; it's about forcing them into a workflow within a content management system, a rigid digital framework designed to organize information and prevent individuals from setting the entire website on fire, either through incompetence or malice.

Naturally, where there is content, there is the paranoid desire to protect it. Businesses often deploy a battery of content protection measures—technologies designed with the Sisyphean goal of preventing unauthorized copying. A futile, yet endlessly funded, endeavor.

Web content accessibility

Here we arrive at the shockingly low bar that most of the internet still manages to trip over: web content accessibility. This is the practice—or, more often, the glaring lack thereof—of designing and developing web content that can be used by everyone, including people with a wide spectrum of disabilities. It's not a feature; it's a fundamental requirement for a web that isn't actively hostile to a significant portion of its users.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in a noble attempt to drag developers into the light, created the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines are built on four core principles, which shouldn't be revolutionary but somehow are:

  • Perceivable: Users must be able to perceive the information being presented. It can't be invisible to all of their senses. This means providing text alternatives for non-text content, like images, so screen readers can make sense of them.
  • Operable: Users must be able to operate the interface. The interface cannot require interaction that a user cannot perform. Think keyboard navigability—if you can't use a site without a mouse, you've failed.
  • Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This means not writing instructions in cryptic jargon and creating predictable, consistent navigation.
  • Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. As new technologies emerge, your content shouldn't just break.

The WCAG defines success criteria at three levels of conformance (A, AA, and AAA), creating a tiered system for compliance that ranges from "the bare minimum" to "actually trying." Adhering to these guidelines isn't just about being a decent human; it facilitates legal compliance in many countries and fosters an environment where the web is usable for everyone. It supports inclusivity and equal access, concepts that are apparently quite difficult to grasp.

See also