
Drupal CCK lets you specify how to display a field for an entire content type. There might be cases where you would want to specify how to display a field for a particular node, ie choose field formatter on a per node basis in your Drupal site. A common scenario would be to let an author decide which formatter to use for a field when they create a node. For e.g. you might wish to allow the author to select which type of ImageCache preset to use when the they are about to create the node.