But in a technical sense, “content” is fungible. While there are exceptions, from a technical standpoint, boingboing articles (say) are not unique snowflakes. Otherwise, you would not be using Wordpress, RSS would not be a thing and technical people would not be able to refer to “content” or “payloads”. To your back end or the technical folks responsible for building websites, unit count and format matter more and that’s the way it should be. It matters to them so you, the writer of articles, the creative person, do not have to worry about leading or margins or font size or pagination every time you write an article.
If you think that you can fuss over all the minor details while being able to keep on writing, then go right ahead. Open up that text editor, write out your stuff, put in all the HTML formatting. build me a magazine layout. Put in the page marks, the drop caps, the page numbers. I mean, content is inseparable from the presentation, right? The very visibility and comprehensibility of this comment whether on mobile device, monitor, screen-reader, etc puts the lie to Cory’s thesis.
The abuse of a technical term by some people invalidates neither the term itself nor the concept underlying the term’s existence.
