On CMSes and Magazines

I ran across the first (proper) post on the new A Brief Message site yesterday about the death of print, and since then it's done the rounds, as has the post describing the thinking behind the site. A good summary is this quote, which has been picked up by other people:

online publications don’t necessarily need to be decorated databases

As the comments on the brief message say, there's a difference between newspapers dying and magazines dying. Newspapers feel a lot like print's equivalent of a decorated database; the content (data) is king, and presentation takes second place to the demands of the story. Magazines, on the other hand, have a longer lead time, and while this makes them less useful for timely information, they still have a lot more flexibility with layout and pictures, something Khoi Vinh himself talked about in his post about the graphic design of US highway signage and the NY Times story about the same.

To return to the quote, though, currently CMSes really don't help with this process, meaning that most online publications are more like newspapers. What's needed is a way of attaching design, as well as just images (and other assets), to an article. Currently the only way I can think of to do this is by editing the raw HTML of your posts, but storing that in your database is a bad idea. (Just ask anyone who's ever implemented a redesign on such a site.) At least, that's how I assume A Brief Message is built.

Much better - although also much harder for CMS designers - would be a way of attaching a style sheet (and the associated style IDs) as a structured part of the storage. The per-post CSS file could be a seperate asset, but the style declarations might be harder to manage. However, I'm sure there's a way, even though it looks like nobody's really tried yet. I wonder if the new plugin architecture of the new version of Movable Type is rich enough to do so?