1 post tagged “ui”
Given the recent growth in DOM parsing capabilities of modern web applications such as Dapper, it's great to see this UI metaphor entering mainstream content management. We all know UI experts wax and wane over the benefits of certain approaches to building accessible yet efficient interfaces for content, but lets consider the realization that most approaches are variations of the same core scenario or workflow. For example, there's really only been 2 classes of content entry (perhaps even data entry?) worth mentioning in the last decade of web content management.
- Entry via forms, or structured authoring
- WYSIWYG authoring, or unstructured authoring
- Hybrid models of the former
It sill surprises me that 90% of enterprise vendors do not offer hybrid authoring; that is, the ability to demarcate certain placeholders or elements on a page as "editable" along side other unstructured, free form elements. MOSS 2007 barely does this, IBM WCM doesn't. Blogs? Don't get me started, they come up short.
That aside, I think that the folks at TypeRoom may have stumbled upon an entirely new paradigm not just for content entry. More specifically, I think that whereas it's obvious that this type of DOM-directed content authoring has it's merits, there's clearly areas in which the best practices or even the applicability is not proven, such as:
- How to handle content creation, not just editing of existing items
- Controlling security, permission and workflow upon page elements, not just entire pages
- How to map the underlying storage / data model underneath robust, reusable templates
While it's obvious that TypeRoom is using it's TypeRoom Lite offering as an online demo for the IP they've created in their WYSIWYG editor, it's understanding the final point about reusable templates which is key. Their tool allows authors to make changes without conforming to templates - you can just modify the end result, the DOM, without interrogating or otherwise being coupled to the underlying template from which it was cast. This alone has great uses - portability of the solution, abstraction from a server side language, etc. But ironically enough, I think the most value derived from such a codebase is not from its use as an authoring tool, but as a templating tool.
CMS experts will agree with me that if TypeRoom can use their DOM inspecting codebase as a mechanism for creating CMS template definitions (the process for turning an HTML design into an author accessible template with editable elements and placeholders) then they stand to become a strong aquisition target for existing ECM providers, or other SaaS-centric vendors looking for a solution to their "templating for non-techies" quagmire. Because after all, it's all about empowering the non-technical business users, and who says that they can't create templates as well as edit pages?
