Chris Stead.com

When I wrote my first post about object-oriented content, I was thinking in a rather small scope. I said to myself, “I need content I can place where I need it, but I can edit once and update everything at the same time.” The answer seemed painfully clear: I need objects.

Something funny happened between then and now. I realized that content is already made up of objects. All at once, I discovered I was one with all of the content scattered across the web. It was a very zen moment I’m not sure I could recreate on my best day.

See, we are already working with content objects everywhere, but we just haven’t noticed. Take Twitter for instance. Twitter specializes in the content object. It’s a very small object, but it’s there all the same. Take, for instance, a tweet from my feed.

My one tweet is both content on its own and it is part of my feed which is also content. The same can be said for blog posts, RSS feeds, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, that picture of your cat and any other of a number of things scattered across the web. Continue Reading »

There has been a lot of talk about graceful degradation. In the end it can become a lot of lip service. Often people talk a good talk, but when the site hits the web, let’s just say it isn’t too pretty.

Engineers and designers work together, or divided as the case may be, to create an experience that users with all of their faculties and a modern browser can enjoy. While this goes down, the rest of the world is left feeling a bit chilly.

What happens is, the design starts with the best of intentions and, then, the interactivity bug takes hold. What comes out is something that is almost usable when slightly degraded, but totally non-functional when degraded to the minimum. Continue Reading »