ON 'CMS' vs. 'DMS'
'Management' would be the key term in the acronym. If a system meets
an organisation's definition of 'management' then it's fair to
describe Contribute as a CMS.
-certain content areas can be restricted to authors,
-there is tracking of 'who made what change', and
-earlier versions of pages can be archived for the purpose of auditing
There is little that differentiates a document management system from
a content management system. One meaningful aspect is a metaphorical
shift from thinking of document = file, to document = (template +
content + associated metadata records, etc.). As documents become
more 'active' (for example when something is a working document with
multiple contributors) there is greater need to move away from the
physical metaphor common to most DMS's. Consequently document
management system are likely to be transformed into something that
exhibits the characteristics of a content management system. (Of
course this all comes down to definition of 'management' and the
tools being evaluated).
ON WYSIWYG EDITORS AND SEMANTIC MARKUP
Semantic markup requires the author to engage with the meaning of the
content. Their understanding of what is meaningful is influenced by
understanding of the content, context, business rules, etc.
The difficultly with creating a 'semantic-aware' editor is that
programmatically it is not possible to determine whether markup *is*
semantic, only whether markup is valid (conforms to a technical
specification).
How many times have you come across a Word document where content has
be formatted to look like a heading? The same problems are associated
with claiming an wysiwyg editor supports semantic markup. As an
example, how can a system evaluate whether a line of text *should be*
marked up as a paragraph. heading or caption?
Knowledgeable/informed author/developer + code editor that enables
appropriate markup = semantic markup.
CONTRIBUTE NOTES
With regard to Contribute, there's a free 30 day trial available from
Macromedia for evaluation purposes. Put it through its paces and see
what you think. Last time I checked, Contribute did not
programmatically generate navigation. The author needs to manually
link all pages. From this perspective it is more suited to brochure
level websites than publishers or e-commerce applications.
Cheers,
--
Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director
Motive | web.design.integrity
http://www.motive.co.nz
ph: (04) 3 800 800 fx: (04) 970 9693
mob: 021 369 693
93 Rintoul St, Newtown
PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand
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