> Hi Steve, Rex, > This thread is close to my heart and Steve, I think Rex has a point. I've > been doing a lot of research recently; I hadn't done the round in about a > year. I don't know why I never noticed but there is a MAJOR rift in system > architecture that Rex is alluding to. A CMS IMHO *must* be able to manage > content _internally_ before any template has been built - ie. framework. I > was taught that CM means having, as Rex said, tools that let you manage a > core of structured content that can be intelligently exported any way you > want it. I can't find a written down definition for you Steve but that's > the idea. I've been surprised at the number of systems that don't do it. > Question for every vendor on this list: Can you create content without a > template? > > a. > > PS. Good call Rex. > > PPS. My first post to this list like a year ago was about content > management frameworks. I never understood why I didn't get much of a > response.
Isn't this the perfect application for XML and XSLT, with XML you can store unstructured data in that sense you don't enforce a certain schema that it must adhere to, instead you can just define your XSLT templates for different elements that decides how it should be rendered. If you want certain content to follow a strict structure, fine just make a schema and validate against it. You want your content in a different format, fine just reformat using XSLT. Want to render it differently for different platoforms, users, browsers etc etc, XSLT again is the perfect solution. What bothers me with many CMS systems today is that seem to oriented around presentation than about the actual content. XML for instance should describe the *meaning* of data, not how it should be rendered, it shouldn't say <b>Latest news</b>, it should say <headline>latest news</headline>, it shouldn't say <span style="font-family:Verdana;color:red" >08-820951</span> it should say <phonenr areacode="08" country="sweden">820951</phone>. This gives for infinite more flexibility and possibilities in using the content for different purposes. The problem it seems is that vendors want customers to have an easy wysiwyg editor for their content and it's much easier to add some bold, italic, centered etc controls than learn them to write xml documents (even if that should be fairly simple if the structure is simple and you have a template as base). Making a wysiwyg editor for XML is possible certainly but it's a bit tricky task to do one that doesn't constrain the content by oversimplifying the controls. I think you most recognize that in order to have valuable content you must invest some time to format it properly, you can't just "convert" you old html files and word documents Sure it's a big investment but if you take into account that once you have it in xml it's "futureproof" and you'll never convert it again together with the tremendous possibilities of content in XML format it surely is worth it IMO. </endsermon> best regards --- Mattias Konradsson -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
