One of the most compelling reasons to deploy a content management solution is to empower authors to manage their own content. Placeholders are an integral part of the solution, providing editable regions within which authors can enter the content. If you have attended a sales presentation on any content management system, the sales person would have shown you how easily content can be entered into rich text boxes without the author needing to understand HTML tags and codes.
Of course, placeholders do more than provide user-friendly interfaces for authors. They also offer an excellent way to organize and structure content into compartments. For example, instead of storing a page with text and tags mixed together in an inseparable heap, you could store the abstract in a placeholder, the story in a second placeholder, and the summary in a third placeholder. In fact, every chunk of information you divide your page into can be given a corresponding placeholder...