“Headless” Pushback

A couple of times, recently, I’ve seen headless vendors push back on usage of the term “headless.” I wonder if we’re reaching an inflection point where “headless CMS” is considered pejorative, like “page-based.”

The reasoning in both cases was that they were “more” than headless. They saw headless as the type of CMS that just powers some JS frontend, where they were trying to position themselves as a “content hub” or more enterprise/backend content provider.

Additionally, “headless” implies removal. The “-less” suffix says, “There was something here, but we took it out and you don’t get it anymore.” So, at the risk of totally abusing language, the industry is “headful normative,” meaning that a CMS with a delivery tier is the norm, and headless is going against that grain.

There are some people who want to see this perspective change – that, even if headless never becomes “the new normal,” it’s seen as an architecture alongside the traditional, coupled CMS, and doesn’t need to be called out or qualified as something notable.