The lost promise of headless
In recent years, headless technology, which boosts performance, developer experience, and best-of-breed headless systems, has gained significant traction in web development. At its core, headless streamlines and accelerates the process of building and delivering web experiences through APIs, which separates content creation and management from presentation.
However, despite the excitement and promise, headless technology has fallen short in living up to its potential in several key areas.
Technical complexity
The primary appeal of headless technology lies in decoupling content creation and presentation, as a result of which developers can work on the presentation layer with their preferred tools and frameworks while content editors can focus on building and managing content. However, that separation comes at a cost. Specifically:
Content-editing challenges
Another major challenge with headless technology is the disconnect between content editors and the systems they work with. Due to the abstract nature of headless CMS (generally combined with other sources), content editors often struggle to pinpoint how their content will be displayed on the front end, leading to confusion, frustration, and a steep learning curve for novices.
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Moreover, the lack of a clear connection between content and presentation makes it difficult for content editors to preview their work and ensure that it looks and functions as intended. A suboptimal user experience results, let alone a time sink for revisions and troubleshooting.
The way forward
Headless technology revolutionized how we build web experiences, but a few serious hurdles remain. To overcome them, tools and processes that facilitate team collaboration and streamline the development process are necessary so that developers and content editors can work closely together to bridge the gap between content creation and presentation.
A new approach is a digital experience composition platform (DXCP), which seamlessly integrates content and presentation without compromising the technical architecture. While on that platform, non-developers can visually create and manage digital experiences with content from multiple sources, delivering those experiences agnostically to a front-end of choice, significantly reducing technical debt, and gaining flexibility. Businesses can then adapt and innovate much faster, especially since the connection to all headless systems and APIs occurs in the DXCP (stored on the CDN-edge with surgical cache invalidation), and the code remains clean.
I'm excited about enabling content editors to be more autonomous and giving the developers some help by not asking them to write glue code to query and manipulate data. Let developers do what they do best: build excellent experiences for end users without being constantly asked to make changes on behalf of content editors.
Obviously, more nuance is needed to get all this to work, as every architecture is different. Comment down below, and let's discuss!
Shopify Expert | Web Developer | Specializing in Store Optimization, App Integration & Custom Theme Development
1yIs there a working example of DXCP, I could Google it but it would be cool to hear your example before the flood of Google results.
Shopify Expert | Web Developer | Specializing in Store Optimization, App Integration & Custom Theme Development
1yThe early selling point of Headless was that your content could be distributed to many different systems... which makes sense because many early tools don't have a visual editor. But I would suspect that 90% of headless CMSs are being used to publish websites, which is why you now see more visual editor tools. We strive for perfection in all things we humans do, but each solution solves problems while creating others. It's the churn that keeps the industry going and also the churn that tends to cycle concepts in a loop every few years (static sites, for example). You mentioned glue code, something like an adapter for data models. I could see AI doing this work for us in the future; it seems the perfect solution for something like that.