This is a response to a very specific post in the thread titled "Content Management Framework". My response also addresses the age-old [just when you thought it was dead] cms-list debate about the separation of content and presentation.
Here's the post: > Isn't that missing the point? Authors shouldn't care less about how > their content is *rendered*, they should care about how their content is > structured and what it means :) I think getting from the "how it looks" > mindset to the "what it means" is one of the most important factors of > the advancements of CMS's > > best regards > --- > Mattias Konradsson Warning: you may encounter incomplete sentences, dangling participles and other grammatical atrocities... Yours is a very dangerous and destructive generalization shared by vendors, technical purists, and business managers and [unfortunately] forced upon unwilling users. What you suggest may work fine for mundane writing assignments, but it is both inappropriate for and downright obstructive to many creative writing assignments. Indulge me... "...writing is an art form, just like painting or theatre or music" - the Literary Appeal Award Program A simple statement, yet one that is profoundly misunderstood by many businesspeople and by the CM industry in general. To many writers, how their content is rendered is just as important as the writing itself. Indeed for many writers, their work is the sum of its parts - to include the formatting [font family, color ,size, etc.] , and spatial relationships [between words, sentences, paragraphs, imagery, and so forth]. Now consider that there are more than 50 different careers in writing....yes, more than 50. And within each career there are innumerable idiosyncratic styles and requirements. Some writers choose to format and organize their text early and often, while others choose to focus on content first and presentation later. Still others are willing to leave the presentation decisions to someone else. So on and so forth. As a businessperson, particularly if your business is heavily dependent on its creative content as a strong sustainable differentiator, should you enforce business processes and mandate tools that could stifle a writer's creative process? unnatural processes that may impair your writer's ability to write? Not if you value your business. Asking creative writers to use your newfangled tools and processes to create their work is a losing proposition, especially when they know it benefits your business more than it does their legacy. Ask a mystery writer if she's willing to change her ways in order to accommodate distribution across multiple publishing channels. Ask a journalist on deadline creating a 16-inch feature column if he wouldn't mind writing his story using an XML word processor with no immediate feedback about story length and headline fit. Fact is, the process of writing a novel or a poem or a feature story [or any other creative work] shouldn't be managed as an assembly line of distinct sequential tasks: write, edit, format, print. And what works well for a technical writing team may not work so well for an ad agency's creative team. Confused? Spend one day at a newspaper publisher. Spend a week with a novelist. Spend a month with a magazine feature writer. I'll leave you with this variation of your original comment. Integrating seamlessly with the creative process is one of the most important factors for the advancement of CMS's Joe -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
