Drupal 7 introduces a number of new apis and with those comes new jargon. Untangling that could be daunting. I'll try to briefly sketch what is what and relate it to terminology outside of the Drupal world.
Fields
Let's start with fields. They are the incarnation of the CCK fields moved to Drupal core. Finally. It took about five years, the hard work of a lot of people, unmentionable number of debates and patches. And it is worth it. But what are fields? One answer can be found at Field Api. In essence, a field is a primitive drupal data type implementing the interface described in those pages. For example file field, text field, etc... Modules can define new field types.
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