You are all winners!
Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an article today called YOU ARE ALL IN PUBLISHING! filled with a somewhat nonsensical platitude: If you work on the web, you are in publishing.
You work with content, therefore you are a publisher
It interests me that a statement so banal could be written as so profound. To adapt one of Jeffrey’s metaphors, this statement is like a reality show putting music behind an intrinsically boring picture of a guy sitting on a beach to stir emotion. It’s like saying “if you are bi-pedal and have opposable thumbs… you are human!” (Wait for applause).
Sure, if you create something you’re creative. If you build something you’re a builder. If you art something you’re an artist, and if you shit something, you’re an animal. So yes, if you publish some material out into the world for digestion, you’re a publisher. If you create the PSD or the CSS that wraps the content and then publish said content you’re a publisher.
Traditionally publishing, as a word, is associated with print materials: periodicals, newspapers, trade magazines, books. On the web its included long-form content, written word, even videos. This sort of design involves crafting content around different themes, topics, vulgarities. It also involves, as Jeffrey points out, craft: line-height, widows, asides, etc.
However, where does the DBA fit in here? They’re merely generating a storage mechanism for content, not particularly creating or publishing. They are working on the web, but not publishing (except for, of course, their fascinating advanced PostgreSQL blog). Yet schema design can very much affect how the front-end interacts with content via the backend. I don’t think of a DBA as a publisher. Under the very generic terms Jeffrey has laid out, sure. That’s the great thing about platitudes!
But really, the bigger problem…
and it is designers even more than editors who will answer these riddles.
It is no more designers problems than everyone’s problem. Listen, developers have a messiah complex too, but this is ridiculous. The delivery of content and who pays for it runs into barriers only defeated by a system that backs an intuitive user experience, and copy that sells appropriately. Who will write the video player that intuitively plays HTML5 content back on multiple devices? Doesn’t seem like a design issue. Seems like a design and development issue.
Like all problems it’s not just one group who solves it but generally multiple over time who adapt and|or steal and then adapt again.
We’re all in this together, publishers. So think carefully before you praise a blog post without any practical, pragmatic meat in it. This one you’re reading right now included.
P.S. A sonnet is a song without music. Originally it started as music but then evolved into its current form.