Today’s content architecture rant is about… perfection and reality. As in… “For many organizations, perfect modeling of the distinction between presentation and message is impractical, because they don’t produce enough content to make the distinction a show-stopper.”
One of the difficult challenges for any content strategist (or CMS architect, or IA pro) is making the judgement call that for certain types of editorial product, “Just jam a bunch of stuff into that field” is… maybe okay.
The problem is that — as with expedient technical hacks that are accepted because “they work for now” — you still have to understand the pros and cons, and keep a careful eye on how it’s working in the real world, or it will come back to bite you bad.
IIRC, @gregddunlap and I often call this stuff “sin-eater content types.” Their job is to do weird, ugly, one-off stuff that is uncommon enough that modeling it is a poor investment for a high-volume editorial workflow.
When done carefully, it can make the rest of the content model much cleaner — because it’s not trying to cope with the weird edge cases that the “sin eater” absorbs in its pile of ad-hoc HTML and inline-css horribleness.
But the inevitable danger is that the “sin eater” slowly grows to consume all content an org produces. As needs evolve, editors move to THAT content type rather than raising new requirements and pushing the evolution of the well-modeled structures.