"One of the challenges of any content technology project is standardizing on a particular set of terminology. Without that, you risk confusion among the business users, developers, managers, vendor staff, and consultants who may all participate in your project."
Do you ever! It sometimes seems to me that CMS providers make a point of creating their own unique and even proprietory terminology. Standardisation is a long, long way away.
Tony Byrne gives a glimpse of the chaos behind the scenes. As one of hundreds of possible examples, Tony hones in on the terminology used in content analysis. The variation is downright scary. How does anyone know what anyone else means?
Since the electronic publishing industry is still young, myriad analysts, consultants, and vendors use their own terminology, which can make things very confusing. Here's a chart of some commonly used synonyms or approximations for type and element.
Either cunningly or accidentally, Tony provides an example of the confusion produced by variable terminology. In the CMS Watch newsletter, the link-text to the article is A Vocabulary for Content Analysis, but in the blog, it's A Lexicon for Document Analysis.
Just proves it can happen to the best of us, and this is a great article!
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