3. Document management or content management

The preceding paragraph has shown that computer techniques enable the production of documents that we have described as fixed, dynamic and ephemeral. It also showed that paper cannot represent all possible states, and that the screen is increasingly taking over.

• It's here, on this obvious point, that we need to separate medium, content and form. These three considerations can be distinguished and treated differently thanks to computer technology.

  • On the one hand, there's the choice of a reading and hearing medium adapted to human abilities. This mainly involves paper and screens. But we can already mention e-paper, e-book or, more generically, podcasting. All of these require a display screen. But once the parameters for content formatting and presentation have been standardized, changing media...