Thank you for the re-injection of some uncommon-sense, Andy. Sheesh! You leave the zoo for one weekend and look what the animals get up to while you're away. ;)
FWIW I take Geoff's original rebuttal as read. A CMS is different thing sto different people. The problem is finding one that wil do what you want. Now can we put the Contribute debate to rest? :) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andy Kirkwood, Motive Sent: Saturday, 3 December 2005 11:31 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WSG CMS] Dreamweaver & Contribute (How do they work?) 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 ********************************************************* The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ ********************************************************* ********************************************************* The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *********************************************************
