Importance of structured content

Drupal has long been viewed favorably for its structured content capabilities offered to site builders. So, why is this so important?

Content management went through a bit of an evolution, starting around 1995 when programming languages such as ASP and PHP were introduced. Earlier CMSs ran software that annotated, scanned, and managed content through flat files. Those flat files were either HTML or software-generated HTML. HTML would still require uploads to web servers. While this was fine for simple content updates, content would end up being duplicated.

Take a news article, for instance.. That same news article may be featured on a listing found on every page and have its page with the full article. The listing likely lists the title of the news article and maybe a teaser to lead readers in. However, the title ends up being duplicated on basically any page where the listing is displayed and on the full article. Now, imagine this at scale where...