I have struggled over whether to use the CMS because the items I consider content seem to be spread out among the different attributes of a table row. Why are the article paragraphs more important than the title? In my case, I don't have huge chunks of data, so choosing which attribute should be the content seems kind of arbitrary.
Another point is that the content usually associated with the content repository is deeply structured. Having an news article stuffed into a single attribute is more than arbitrary, it is incorrect.
It is easy to argue that this is the best we can do, that the 'content' is 'html'. Wrong! Content is not html. In five years most content will be contained in an xml document, or something else.
It seems inevitable that, in the future, the fine details of a real world document will be represented in a structured markup language, not as attributes in a database table. How is OpenACS going to address this issue?
If the you have pure data, a markup language is way too heavy. For structured data, you could try the Rmadilo language, which should parse faster than csv and represent the same structured non-markup data as xml.
