Web content is the textual, visual or aural content that is encountered as part of the user experience on websites. It may include, among other things: text, images, sounds, videos and animations.
In “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (second edition, page 219), Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville write, “We define content broadly as ‘the stuff in your Web site.’ This may include documents, data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web pages, archived e-mail messages, and more. And we include future stuff as well as present stuff.”
While the Internet began with a U.S. Government research project in the late 1950s, the web in its present form did not appear on the Internet until after Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the European laboratory (CERN) proposed the concept of linking documents with hypertex.
Web content is dominated by the “page” concept. Having its beginnings in an academic settings, and in a setting dominated by type-written pages, the idea of the web was to link directly from one academic paper to another academic paper. This was a completely revolutionary idea in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the best a link could be made was to cite a reference in the midst of a type written paper and name that reference either at the bottom of the page or on the last page of the academic paper.
Even though we may embed various protocols within web pages, the “web page” composed of “html” (or some variation) content is still the dominant way whereby we share content. And while there are many web pages with localized proprietary structure (most usually, business websites), many millions of websites abound that are structured according to a common core idea.
Blogs are a type of website that contains mainly web pages authored in html (although the blogger may be totally unaware that the web pages are composed using html due to the blogging tool that may be in use). Millions of people use blogs online.
To sump up, we can say web content is a very interesting and useful work which has revolutionized on the Internet’s world.
References
- Web content. (2008, December 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:36, January 7, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_content&oldid=257314537
- Web page concept and design: getting a web site up and running (10 October 2006) In DLIST. Retrieved 11:39, January 7, 2009 from: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1539/
