Rich Content Website Lean Content Website
And the curse of Markdown
Have you ever felt frustrated knowing how to explain something, but finding that written words fail to capture your thoughts? This means the medium you're using isn't rich enough to express your message. If the medium is the web, we can fix that.
Media Richness Theory
Media Richness Theory is a framework for ranking communication media based on their ability to express complex messages.
A scale from leaner to richer goes like this:
- Unaddressed documents (bulk mail, posters)
- Addressed documents (letters, email)
- Phone calls
- Video conferencing
- Face-to-face meetings
Richer doesn't mean better. When you choose a richer medium you are usually paying some type of cost. That's why people often say "This meeting could have been an email."
Leaner media are more cost-efficient, richer media are more expressive. That's the trade-off.
Media Richness Theory for content websites
This framework is from 1986 and hasn't age very well. But we can borrow some ideas to think about content websites.
The web is a versatile medium, it can be as lean or as rich as you want. You can build a lean website with just text, or a rich website with interactive, personalized, collaborative, multimedia content.
Remember, richness means: the ability to express complex messages.
This is particularly important for technical content, where the message is usually complex and lean text-based websites fall short in providing clarity.
I believe that most technical content websites aren't rich enough.
And the main reason is Markdown. Markdown and all the tooling around it made it very easy to build lean websites, which skewed the lean vs rich trade-off towards lean.
That's why we need better tooling for building rich content websites. To restore the balance.
And that's why I'm building Code Hike.
Learn more:
- Watch my JSHeroes 2024 talk on this topic
- Read about fine-grained markdown