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Ask HN: What does a “web content developer” do on a daily basis?

• folkhack 8y ago
  Typically they'll basically be a markup resource. IE: I have a ton of documents in one format, and I need them to be translated to clean HTML. The other thing that may be needed in this position is actual content development skills, ie: writing. You could be responsible for doing blog posts, pages on websites, marketing copy, etc. "Web content developer" would also be the lowest paid position in an agency typically. The salary ladder goes "web content|web maintenance/support" > "front-end|SEO|social/marketing" > "back-end|fullstack" > "management" > "ownership" in my experience.
  • iopuy 8y ago
    In my experience, 10-15 years ago front end developers were noticeably paid less than back end developers but not so much in today's environment.
• amiga-workbench 8y ago
  So we have a guy working for us in this role, they take word documents containing training modules and enter then into an e-learning system we developed for a client. Its mostly entering text, EXML tags for interactive content, and the odd bit of styling (there should be little CSS involved in this as there is a global content stylesheet but sometimes there are edge cases) I recently finished a bunch of upgrades that parse DocX files, rips out the contents list, pre-fills the structure in the system, auto-imports all image assets and an extra utility that individually rips tables out of the DocX file and converts them to HTML. This was all to speed them up a bit. On top of content entry you are required to do a lot of proof-reading and review work to make sure what you have entered is faithful to the document and generally correct.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    Is parsing docx pretty robust these days or is it difficult to grab all of the styling components? There is a group of people where I work that write content exclusively in docx and it’s difficult to convince them to change their workflow because of all the styling Word offers and familiarity with the tool. If there are super robust solutions that make it easy to basically turn docx into something parseable while conserving the styling aspects I haven’t found them yet.
    • kapep 8y ago
      Pandoc can convert docx into many formats. How robust it actually is probably depends a bit on how complex the styling and layout is done though.
    • amiga-workbench 8y ago
      Its still not great, I've found no way to convert DocX into a sane intermediate format so I've ended up writing a few specialised parsers that can make fairly decent sense of a few small cases like tables of contents, tables and lists. My table parser still isn't perfect, its had a few documents thrown at it with merged cells that look just fine in Word, but don't have the colspan attributes I'm expecting. Its still significantly reducing the workload of our content guy, he just has to double check how its displaying. I've largely tried to avoid styling extraction but I did have a quick go, tables do contain properties for background colours and border tinting but the values don't seem to match what is being displayed within word. I think DocX has an equivalent of a stylesheet kicking around somewhere which may contain more accurate styling info but my work hasn't required that I look into it yet.