I don’t know if this adds to the discussion or not, but maybe I can give a point of view that’s a little different on what the word content means to developers instead of its normal usage.
A few years ago I worked with a very large “content management” software company. I’d never heard the term before. I had done some website design on a small scale but never worked on these huge websites, which are programmed in a very different way from the little 20, 40, 60 page websites that I’d put together in Dreamweaver or hand coded in HTML.
The company I worked for, Fatwire (now owned by Oracle), created a program that was used by companies like Walmart, GM, Ford, many very large banks, Best Buy, the NYTimes. So, GIANT websites.
Just to give you an idea of how big these sites are, in order to be qualified to purchase this software, you had to have a minimum of 60 programmers. The sales people wouldn’t even consider selling this product to you if you did not have 60 programmers on staff just for the content management - so, probably there would be another 60 people dedicated to the shopping cart software and another 60 people who programmed the look and feel of the website and another 60 on the databases of products. Image 500 people working on a website at the same time - these are not the sort of websites that I was building in Dreamweaver by a long shot.
The NYTimes is a good example of how this software works. Let’s say I’m a reporter. I really need a simple way to upload a story, so the programmers use this software to create a form with fields like Byline, Headline, Text, Keywords, etc. The reporter enters all their stuff in, presses a button and uploads it. Then that form feeds to a supervisor who sees a different version of the form with maybe stuff like Release Date and Time, Content Checked for Spelling, Content Checked for Accuracy, and some such. That form feeds up the chain until somewhere there is a guy or gal who is in charge of releasing all of the final stories to the live website.
The live website DOES NOT exist anywhere as you view it in your browser. It’s weird if you have programmed a little webpage where you can toggle between the code and the “web view” to wrap your head around how these sites exist. They are just pieces of code (“assets” in programming speak) that at any given minute are in flux as programmers upload new style information or content managers upload new stories or shopping cart people add some new feature. There is never a moment where the website achieves some kind of stable state. All these little bits and pieces of code get cobbled together by your browser into the final product you view. There is no final “page” anywhere on the web server for the NYTimes.
THIS is what programmers mean by “content” being separated from “design.” Not that the NYTimes designers don’t try to design their website to display news in a way that is engaging or appropriate for the kinds of information that they display, but that the content is handled differently in the program from the code that tells your browser how it looks and how the buttons work.
