Nate on Contribute and some CMS musings

Nate wrote up his experiences with using Contribute. Seems it was adding stuff to his markup, and based on my experiences, I can’t say that I am shocked. This seems to be a running theme with any type of Content Management System these days, and one that we have struggled with on PGA.com as well.(Todd mentioned this in the interview linked below.) It’s a difficult balance to strike between making sites easy to update, and preserving the perfect integrity of the code you posted in the first place. This is further complicated by the fact that the bulk of these tools were, for the most part, coded when crappy markup wasn’t considered such a big deal. My perception, especially from talking to the tool vendors that I have worked with, is that their attitude is the dreaded “it works on ie win32.” I’d like to see more effort put into standardizing the markup created by the browser based WYSIWYG editors, because that is where a good chunk of the problem lies. It’s tough to draw any conclusion to this musing, but the other place where the problem exists is one that a good content management system should let you have control, in it’s templating and element control system. Most, if not all, full blown content management systems do not give you this level of control.