Oftentimes, we will need to design and even develop for unknown content. Maybe a client has a copywriter that is still in the process of producing the content. Maybe the project is a blog that will have regular content additions or a white paper template. When this happens, designers and developers do what we’ve been trained to do; reach for lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum, originally uploaded by missha

So what’s the big deal? Why am I picking on the placeholder text that has been used for over 400 years? The problem is not with the text itself; in fact, it excels at shifting the focus from content to presentation. The problem is that it only represents a single type of content, the paragraph.

Writing good content isn’t easy; a challenge that is only exacerbated by the hyperlinked nature of the web. What does good content look like? Good content is varied and rich, like the content on LogLogic’s site. Rich content is written using element beyond paragraphs such as bulleted lists, numbered lists, glossary lists, hyperlinks, emphasis, citations, quotations, pictures, pull-quotes, and data tables. Lorem ipsum, as-is, neither explores the design of these elements nor encourages their use.

Anyone familiar with markup semantics will recognize that most of the above list is represented in HTML as various elements. That’s not simply because I think in markup semantics; it’s because the goal of HTML isn’t to create web pages, but to create hyperlinked documents with rich content.

In case you couldn’t already tell, I’m advocating putting together new standardized dummy text, a richer dummy text, “Lorem Ipsum 2.0” if you must. Content changes and the design and implementation should be ready for it. We’d love to get some input on the format this should take, or better yet, even invoke the lazyweb. After all, the results should end up being creative commons licensed. We, the industry, need to get started on this right away; we at RD2 will be.