The Digital Publishing Dictionary

The digital world can be tough. Terms come and go at such a pace, and before you know it, everyone’s chattering about HTML and mobile-first strategies without having ever stopped to explain what they mean.

We here at Page Lizard are just as guilty of this, and we’re aware that people can sometimes be a little embarrassed to stop us and ask about the basics.

So here, in plain English, is the beginner’s guide to common Digital Publishing terms.

Article-based publishing

This term has been propelled to fame with Apple’s release of its ‘News’ feature with iOS 9. It does what it says on the tin – it’s literally publishing content as individual articles rather than bundled issues. It’s important because readers are engaging more effectively with articles compared to issues, and our bets are that this trend will eventually dominate, particularly amongst the socially-savvy consumers.

Channel

‘Channels’ and ‘streams‘ are confusingly often interchanged in digital publishing, but there’s a fine difference between them. A channel is a container to stream something through – so as an example, in Apple News, Wired magazine will have its own Wired channel to push content through. The content that actually goes through will be the stream. Another way of looking at it is on this blog: the Page Lizard blog is the ‘channel’, but the blog posts are the ‘stream’. Phew…

CMS

This stands for ‘Content Management System’, and is just a generic term for an application that allows users to publish, edit and modify content. CMS’ are used in many ways in the publishing industry, for managing the workflow of a publication to editing a website, and usually allow users to work in a collaborative way – WordPress is a popular CMS for websites.

When we talk about the Page Lizard CMS (fondly named ‘Egg*’), it’s simply a web-based tool built for publishers who don’t have access to their own content management system. We manage all the uploading, production, design and distribution of our client’s publications through Egg.

CSS

A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) defines how HTML elements are to be displayed. In digital publishing terms, let’s take the example of an article. The HTML tags would define the heading, the subheading, and the pullquotes. The CSS stylesheet attached would define the size, colour and font of those elements across all articles, so the style of these elements can easily be changed without having to adjust every single article. Think of it as a brand toolbox, with all the colours, fonts and more to get the digital publication looking like it belongs to the publisher.

Content curation

In publishing terms, a content curator is someone or something that gathers and organises content from different sources (normally blogs or news sites) and sorts it into topics or particular areas of interest. Content aggregation is another term that you may have come across in relation to this – aggregation is the gathering of unsorted content, before it is curated. Both aggregation and curation can be automated, and there are a number of popular apps that do this such as Flipboard, Feedly and Pinterest.

Dual-view

This is usually mentioned in reference to our apps, and means that publications can be viewed both in its original PDF form, and in mobile-responsive text view. Being able to switch between the two is great for catering for a variety of readers, as some may be more comfortable with a familiar PDF view and others prefer to read the mobile-responsive version.

Flash

Adobe Flash is a multimedia technology that supports a lot of animation and interactive content. The free plugin is included in most* major browsers, and powers most online page-turning digital editions.  Flash has a very rocky relationship with Apple, and most Flash-powered publications don’t work on iPads and iPhones. Fortunately, with the increasing capability of HTML5, the industry dependence on Flash is diminishing.

*Due to security flaws, Firefox goes through phases of blocking Flash. Facebook has also issued calls to Adobe to discontinue the software entirely due to these vulnerabilities.

Flipbook

Flipbooks, flipping-books, Flash page-turners…they all essentially mean the same thing. A flipbook is a PDF that has been churned through a cheap piece of software to look like a magazine, complete with sound-effects and tactfully-positioned drop-shadows. Some flipbook providers will allow you to ‘enhance’ the PDF with links, pop-ups and videos, but the bottom line is that these are fundamentally still page-turners, and present a rubbish mobile reading experience. Pick through the jargon on these sites carefully – it may ‘work on mobile’, but it will be pinch-and zoom functionality. Getting content as HTML is the only way to get a truly mobile-responsive experience.

HTML

‘HyperText Markup Language’ is the authoring language of websites. Responsive digital publications work on the same principles as responsive web pages, and HTML is the language used to define how that text works on the reader’s device (you may know this as text view). Because all tablet and mobile devices can translate and reflow HTML web pages, they can do the same to HTML articles in apps or web browsers, so it is a language that works across all the different platforms and will be around for a long, long time. Examples of HTML are <h1>, <p>, <body> or <image> tags. CSS stylesheets then define how these are styled. HTML5 is the current revision of the language, and is standardised across the web.

Mobile-first

In a publishing context, this term usually refers to content strategies that put the mobile user experience first (N.B. this term is not exclusive to mobile phones; a mobile device is a tablet or a device that is…well…mobile!). Publishers who adopt a mobile-first approach are often more likely to take notice of engagement statistics and reader feedback, and use them to inform their future digital plans.

See more digital publishing terms on our blog...LinkedIn only has so much space! 

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