Writing for the Web.
A Web page contains so many variables — dynamic presentation as well as content — that the old rules of, say, writing a headline to fit a given space might not seem as valid as they did on the printed page. The Washington Post does a better job of it than others (the Times and its dense galaxy of headlines presented as unordered lists to mind). A case in point is this morning's editorial page reaction to Barack Obama's speech on race:
Here, you get a four-line encapsulation of the page's content, and the result is even amusing, assuming you know the players: Eugene Robinson, the Post's reliably center-left columnist; Michael Gerson, the former Bush staffer who implausibly mined the speeches of JFK and FDR to write talking points for the Current Occupant; and the Post itself, whose editorial page is run by arch-conservative Fred Hiatt, which makes its three-word smackdown of Gerson's column even more interesting.
To me, what is of interest here is how the Post manipulates its content management system to provide a summary of the section's content that would only work on the Web: the same sequence of information wouldn't work as well in the contents box of the printed front page. It requires the immediacy of the hyperlink. Moreover, it is entirely different content from that on the columns' respective pages. You may say that I'm on about nothing here, but most content management systems (including the one I'm using now) are designed to work with strict categories of information; the default would be to excerpt the headline of the column as a hyperlink, which would work technically but almost surely ignore the need for pith. The fact that the Post's Web folks have taken a detail so small into consideration is worthy of congratulation. The Web is different, and no matter how clever we think we are in our talk of "buckets" and so forth, once the buckets are set out, it's worth thinking about teacups and even thimbles.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Language | 19 March 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
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