This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.

Authoring a web site feels like programming

If you take a web-page editor at hand, for example MacroMedia DreamWeaver or Mozilla Composer, you will feel like in a word-processing applications... fine if you are a content author.

But beware, you are writing a programme. I am not talking about the programmatic aspect of the HTML page, It is about the programme of the overall site you are creating whose steps are the interactions of the user triggering (sometimes) browser to server interactions.

It all starts with the insertion of simple visible, static links: they will allow a reader of your page to switch to some other page. And it can go very far in the AJAX, DHTML, Flash, or applet directions.

Although you are an author with the intention of writing content, you end up being a programmer. And consequences of such are heavy:
- in a sense you start to be responsible for the experience the reader will have
- and you should test your content (ideally doing so in all possible browsers of the world) as, for example, your content might be "not working" with a given browser.

The mix between content and interactions is deep, it even goes until the language used, the one of the links or not the links.

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