Leo’s KFI tech guy comments
I listen a lot to Leo Laporte and his podcasts. He used to do the Call for Help on Tech TV. He now has many podcasts and a radio show in LA. A couple weeks ago he had a caller asking about getting back into being a webmaster. Here are most of Leo’s comments -
KFI Tech Guy #281
Around 53 minutes 20 seconds
Caller looking to get back into being a webmaster instead of Frontpage:
What’s changed since you were a webmaster is that people very rarely now design static web pages, that is do the html and coding for a page that doesn’t change…… More and more websites now are dynamic. This was happening 3 years ago, but its now happening almost across the board. Where you have a database of content, and you have an engine, a program, PHP or Perl or ASP.NET, that generates the page by merging the data, the content, from the database, with page design templates, usually in CSS. Then draws the page based on that. There are reasons to do it like that. For example, content is completely separated from layout. We started to move that way 3 years ago, but it’s really come to fruition. Where CSS is everywhere. CSS doesn’t contain content, it’s just layout information. So we’ve separated layout from design. We use these engines because so many of the content creators are not webmasters. They are reporters or writers or bloggers or videographers. So they don’t want to look at HTML. They don’t want to look at design . They want to put their content up. …
Caller question: so it’s very easy to update without having to go back in and hard code?
Leo: Oh it’s beautiful. If you want to see a wonderful example of this, go to csszendgarden.com It was created by a designer to illustrate this exact point. The content of the page is static, it never changes, and then people submit new designs to css zen garden. What you’ll see is, by divorcing design from content, you’re able give a page an amazing range of looks without any way affecting the content.
When a general caller show like this is talking about dynamic websites to callers, you know it’s arrived. We have been doing dynamic database web sites for years. So I guess that means we are ahead of the curve, right? 