Re: Quick Terminology Poll

Julian Voelcker wrote:
> Thanks everyone for the great feedback (so far), it certainly provides 
> a lot of food for thought.
> 
> I think the key thing with the symantiics as to where and when to use 
> names like content, template, layouts, etc comes down to the the 
> structure and capabilities of the system.

Indeed, and that is why it is not difficult but impossible to come up 
with a coherent terminology: the terms are not based on some 
philosophical semantical objective reality, but are instead our 
perception of the systems we use. And the systems we use are, in spite 
of all being CMS's, extremely diverse, both in function, architecture, 
and design. As we have seen, seemingly simple words like "template" or 
"content" can mean very different things to all of us, not because we 
have different ideas about what they are but because of what the 
underlying technology looks like in our respective cases. We simply try 
to put words on what we can see, and what we can see is different.

With a perfect universal language we would be using one word for each 
kind of "template" existing for each system, and those terms would be 
precisely defined *relative to each other*, but this is simply not the 
case. Instead we are using the same names to apply to radically 
different things. The world of CMS's is not alone in doing this kind of 
simplification, but it is an extreme case I think.

So coming up with a terminology which can span and define all of these 
different systems is and should be impossible. It should be impossible, 
because if not there would not be any diversity, and without diversity 
there is no progress, and without progress there is only death.

If one is to get all philosophical about it, that is. :-)

/Rickard