This is a continuation of a thread started at
http://www.mail-archive.com/wsg%40webstandardsgroup.org/msg07211.html


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Amit Karmakar
>
> We use Interwoven's Teamsite at work. Going from version 5.5.2 to 6.1
> has been nothing but a disaster. The Standard version of 6.1 is buggy
> and as they put it they are working on it and would probably have a
> solution in the coming months.
> that is not having a go at Teamsite... but all i am trying to say is..
>
> validation I still think is a different kettle of fish than content
> management. and on the premise that were true.... and agreeable(though
> I know the boundaries are rather vague here)  CMS should not have a
> sales pitch that their code is 'valid' as opposed to the rest.
>
> CMS by definition are modules that manage content. If they did
> validate code(not a requirement) that is good but a rather redundant
> feature. Validation is the work of the architect, designer, developer
> not the module. therefore, selling a product or trying to with a 'we
> produce valid code' is an eyewash!
>  my $0.02
>
> no I dont have anything against WordPress but i do think that
> statement is a mouthful.



On first look one would think that these two are separate issues, but they
are not.

What form is content stored in?  Nearly all CMS store content in markup
form, either in a HTML or XML.  Even those that are storing it in DBs need
some sort of schema to handle remapping of the format back to pages and
often have tags like <p> <b> etc embedded in the text fields.

So if content is in the form of markup, what sense does it make to let it
fall into a non valid form, because particularly for content, its semantic
value degenerates greatly once it looses it's validity as being marked up to
a valid grammar.  After that has happened you may be able to reformat it
into something valid, but the QA on semantic correctness of the content has
been lost.  Your content has lost its form and degenerated.  That's not a
good thing to let happen just because of an oversight.

Most of the major players haven't addressed this as their priority is to be
quick to market.  This is one of the major premises of XML publishing, and
the failure of the major content management systems.  As I see it, only real
XML solutions address these issues.

The only way to avert the degeneration of content is to either store your
data in a valid XML or HTML DTD.

It doesn't matter so much for the likes of forums, but still, the less
effort put into this, the lesser the quality of the marked up having any
semantic value or being able to be wrapped in a valid interface.

The other problem that CMSs have failed to address is proper provision of
metadata.  I'm not talking about embedding metadata in the head of documents
and properties, I'm talking about metadata being at the core of versioning
control.  Without this, it is impossible to rollback to various versions of
collaborative documents, and this is a legal requirement of many large scale
organisations.

--
Geoff
probably not even 2c worth:-)
Well that is the problem


*********************************************************
The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
*********************************************************

Reply via email to