Context precedes Content
King of Web Standards Jeffrey Zeldman says, “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”, and very rightly so. Content is what (mostly) people use World Wide Web for and it can’t take back seat while we design a website. However, based on recent article by Jeff Croft, I believe, Context precedes Content, and ignoring the context is injustice to both content and the user.
Jeff wrote:
In my experience, I rarely want to serve up the exact same HTML to mobile users that I do to desktop users. That’s not to say it never happens. For example, a blog or simple news site may be a case where mobile users really are looking for the same thing that desktop users are — perhaps the same HTML with a screen-specific layout will work great. But, by and large, mobile users have different goals, and that necessitates different HTML.
Since users have different goals in different contexts (desktop and mobile), they need to be served with different content. Hence, Context precedes Content.
More on the subject:
# alan
says on August 18