Cutting through the crap: The essence of content on the future web

You've likely heard about content a lot lately—content is king, content should flow like water, "Content First!". But what IS content in its basest form? Is it HTML? XML? JSON? Is it human-readable plaintext? And once we have our content, how do we transform it to look wonderful on mobile devices, televisions, regular old computers, refrigerators? Where does content end and platform-specific representation begin? The mobile revolution has shown us that our content management and web publishing technologies are entangled and flawed. The web will continue to be consumed by more and more clients, many of which haven't even occurred to us yet. But by thinking deeply and re-examining the essence of our content, we can help to architect a flexible future for the web.