Let’s be honest — so-called “rapid” authoring tools aren’t really rapid at all.
“What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG,) or “rapid” tools, apply styles that are hard-coded into the content, which means that the writing and designing are coupled together.
Authors can write the content while controlling the heading color, font size, paragraph spacing, table shading and more, right within the tool itself.
This should save time, right?
In fact, it does just the opposite.
“In our experience, content authors spend about 60% of their time on layout and formatting & only 40% of their time actually creating content.”
– Xyleme Chief Operating Officer Leslie Farinella
In our latest article, Misadventures in Content Production: Separate Content from Presentation to Save the Day, we explore how locking content into restrictive formats with “rapid” tools makes content difficult to maintain, and all but impossible to reuse and personalize at scale.
