
Ask HN: What does a “web content developer” do on a daily basis? - da02
I saw the term used here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11293323<p>It said the &quot;web content developers&quot; didn&#x27;t know JS, only HTML and CSS. I&#x27;m curious: What do &quot;web content developers&quot; do where they can get by without JS?
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amiga-workbench
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
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.

~~~
amiga-workbench
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.

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folkhack
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.

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iopuy
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.

