Re: Colloquial Tidbits

On 16 Sep 2011, at 05:32, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> I guess what would also be interesting here is Q) what percentage of the Web is using a custom CMS vs … um, static pages?… actually, this is a bit weird, as anything on a that serves content is a CMS (e.g., php, rails, coldfusion, node, etc. are platforms that manage content).

[...]

> We might need a definition of CMS… like I implied above, I see PHP, for instance, as a CMS on which other CMSs can be built. That is, although you can do other things with PHP, it's seems to be heavily geared towards the management and distribution of content on the Web.  


I would disagree with this.

Here are some common CMS attributes:

	* Aimed at non-technical users

	* Allows you to compose a site within an established framework

	* Provides a management interface for items of content

	* Provides a WYSIWYG editing environment

	* Allows you to upload files

	* Provides rudimentary analytics

PHP, Ruby, Python etc are not content management systems. Along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they are languages in which technical folk build content management systems. And I think that's an important distinction. By and large, non-technical people do not author HTML. It seems that markup languages, in general, have failed to deliver on this front. From HTML to TeX, the conceptual jump needed to think about a document in terms of "invisible" mark-up is too much to ask. Which is why, in a response to the need for plain text editing, a cottage industry sprung up around languages like Markdown, which attempt to let you "draw" what you want to see on the page using crude ASCII transliterations.

>> Will probably involve spending lots of time in the
>> DOM inspector. I'm constantly having to draw in boxes to check why the
>> box model isn't quite working as I think it should be.
> Would we be talking one on one to developers? Do you see this being a survey?  

To get back to Sean's original question, as one of the few people in the world who edits HTML by hand, I check my work using DOM inspectors. Clicking about on the page, and inspecting a representation of DOM structure as needed. I cannot remember the last time I checked my work in any kind of validator, beyond the error/warning/inspection console provided to me by my favourite browser.

Most of the developers I know and work with have a similar workflow.

A survey would be interesting though!

Received on Friday, 16 September 2011 12:24:26 UTC