> > In an office environment, it's different, of course, but I'd > like to throw > out the argument that having authors fully understand the concept of > seperating their content completely from any presentational > structure is a > critical concept to grasp for the content management > system/process to work > properly. >
Well, it's obviously because newspaper writers and editors are a more highly evolved species, who innately grasp the concept of XML and taxonomy. Has absolutely nothing to do with growing up with systems such as Atex and its 900-key, 20-pound keyboards, nuh uh :-). Whateve the reasons, Darrel is quite right about reporters and editors. We're currently very happy with our CMS (yay!). The vendor has invested quite a lot of effort (and no doubt money) into building a really snazzy WYSIWYG interface for end users that lets them play around with templates and move stuff around a screen and just in general have hours of fun playing graphics designer. We never use it. We like the older interface, which basically consists of a) menus you pick content from and b) "editors" that consist largely of dropdown boxes and radio buttons wrapped around a text editor. When we do have to do fancy-shmancy stuff, well, we have enough people on staff who can use HomeSite to create tables to drop into the HTML (fortunately, we can expose that in those editors). But I'm not sure I understand why the rest of the world should be forced into this mindset. From what little experience I've had with it, the graphical interface of our system (and we're not even up to the version with the really gee-whizzy stuff, I hear) can force all the sorts of stuff you'd expect from an XML-in-your-face system (i.e., you can't transition a document until you fill in a taxonomy form). Why do we keep trying to force people to adapt to the software instead of the other way around? Adam Gaffin Executive Editor, Network World Fusion [EMAIL PROTECTED] / (508) 490-6433 / http://www.nwfusion.com "I programmed my robotic dog to bite the guy who delivers the electronic mail." -- Kibo -- http://cms-list.org/ more signal, less noise.
