DCMOC

A resolution and a reminisence

January 4, 2008 | Filed under: General

So we’ve just flipped our calendars to a new year. If I make any resolutions, they’re generally the same as those I made the year — or even the day — before: read more, eat better, be more patient, spend more time with my kids, break 80 on the golf course. But even if it isn’t a genuine resolution, this seems like an appropriate time to start a new commitment: to more frequently post content here at dcmoc.com for friends of CM&OC to read and comment upon. I’ll try to do this at least weekly, probably on Fridays.

I thought I’d start this year off with a reminisence. I was thinking recently about an article I read back in the 1990s, when I was first working on Web stuff. I hadn’t looked at this article in years, but the Google faeries found it for me in seconds. The article is called “The flesh & soul of information,” by Dmitry Kirsanov, from April of 1998. (Warning: it’s pretty heady at times, and it’s not really brief.)

This was one in a series of articles that Kirsanov wrote for Webreference.com back in the 1990s. It’s a great article because, 10 years later, nothing about it is untrue. The principles Kirsanov speaks about — separating content from its presentation, emphasizing on the fundamental structure of web content — were true in 1998, are true in 2008 and will be true in 2018.  Take a look and judge for yourselves. Is this still as relevant as I think it is? And, if it is, how should we use these principles when thinking about the online experiences we’re building at Capella? What technology has arisen since then (XML, XSLT, RSS, content management tools) that puts in practice some of the theories he is discussing? Maybe this is just a sentimental piece for me, since it’s an article that really spurred my own way of thinking about Web content and thus helped influence my own career. Seriously: I can remember a 28-year old me reading this (I believe I actually printed out a hard copy and brought it with me on an airplane) and thinking “this guy has nailed it. This is how information actually works.”

And I’d love to hear about other sites, books, articles, or even conversations that others out there found seminal in your careers or in your thinking about this stuff.

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