But what you are talking about is not hard at all to do with a good CMS. I’ll use Wordpress as an example (though I have a feeling it can’t quite pull it off). You would have to structure your template in a way that you have a sort of “canvas” section where individual entries go. Then you can define a specific id for the container of this section and attach a specific stylesheet to it (both using Custom Fields). All of the custom styles for this entry would apply to that id to make the canvas section unique and it would just be a matter of having your template check those custom fields and put the stylesheet in the header and the custom id on the container.

It would be more work but I can totally agree with Jeff that for sites like a high-profile newspaper, putting this extra work in for the Sunday feature is worthwhile.

The whole 9rules site essentially runs off of 4 main files.

Granted, most blogs may not be deep enough to warrant hand-crafting, however that seems to be more a function of how we generally organize blogs (chronologically). We can gain significantly more depth if we organize content in a way that lets both lets the content speak and embraces the hypertextual medium (via complex interlinking). Again, we have to have tools that support and encourage methods of organization beyond chronological lists.

For larger sites using traditional content management schemes, I believe hand-crafting individual pages would be more worthwhile than the typical blog simply because each page will have a longer lifespan. In any case, I think we often treat our content and design as if it were disposable.

Wisdump raises a very good point in their post Building systems that let me design every page: most websites today use templates and as a result most of the pages in the site look very much the same. This is not necessarily bad, but as they point out …