Xml Inches Toward The Mainstream

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July, 2001 by Greg Lindsay

Now that publishing options have expanded way past the Web, the language that allows magazines to create content once and publish anywhere is finally making its entrance on the scene.

IT'S OKAY TO FEEL SORRY FOR MAGAZINE EDITORS struggling to publish online: Just as they are mastering their million-dollar site-development software (that can finally work about as well on the Web as an old copy of QuarkXPress), editors are having to deal with broadband and wireless publishing, content syndication and more.

The way to do this is to kill HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language that defines how Web browsers display a site. Fortunately, a successor has already been found in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). And this time, the old hands at Adobe and Quark have been working with the language since its birth, the better to guarantee that XML plays well with PostScript, fonts and all the other niceties of desktop publishing that HTML never seemed to care about.

If XML does achieve its full potential, it will do two things in particular that expensive production tools like Vignette's V/5 (formerly StoryServer) and Open-Market's Content Server (formerly FutureTense) have done either poorly or not at all. XML will let publishers create content once and then publish it anywhere (cell phones, Palms, the Web), and tie those tools together with traditional magazine production software like Quark's CopyDesk and Adobe's more recent In Copy system.

XML is designed to be a language that allows publishers to keep their data and the way their data is displayed separate. This differs from traditional publishing or HTML, where the content is entwined with the layouts themselves. In those cases, "We essentially have what we would consider 'stovepipe' workflows," says Mark Hilton, Adobe's director of product management. "We know at the point of creating the content that we're going to do this particular thing, and our workflow is oriented around that. The concept of 'create once, publish anywhere' means the decision on how to render your final content gets pushed closer to the delivery end."

So if you create a version of your magazine in XML that is designed to be read on Palms as well as PCs, the machines themselves can decide how to present it, based on the way they are trained to handle the XML instructions sent with the text. PCs that support streaming video will choose to play the clip accompanying a story; a cell phones might compress the layout into a single stream of tiny type.

XML, which has been the next big thing since at least 1997, is finally making its grand entrance on the scene. Companies like Adobe, Quark and Microsoft were blind-sided by the emergence of the Web in 1994 and 1995, and never built the sort of industrial-strength publishing tools that Vignette, OpenMarket and Interwoven stepped in to sell. This time around, Adobe plans to bake the ability to read and write documents as XML files into each of its products, including stalwarts such as Photoshop and Illustrator, along with more recent, magazine-oriented creations like InDesign, InCopy and InScope. That layer of software already appears in Acrobat 5, the latest version of its PDF-creation tool.

"At the last Seybold conference, we did some sneak peeks with In Design," Hilton says. "One of those was to tag InDesign document content as XML, then create documents or tags, and export them as tagged content later used on site of PDAs. We would also take the InDesign content and have it automatically flow into Web templates."

Unless Adobe defines "automatically" very loosely, that would be an improvement over the procedures in place at most magazines now, where there is little or no bridge between the content residing in the layout and that in online publishing systems. At magazines such as Business Week, copy is manually copied from layouts, saved as text, e-mailed or copied to disks and passed along to production teams. XML-based tools could skip an unnecessary step or two.

Quark isn't far behind in coupling more tightly with the next revision of its flagship, the warhorse XPress. It currently provides XML import and export abilities through the plug-in Avenue. Like Adobe, Quark executives trumpet the coming era of "media-independent publishing," but also admit that kludges like Avenue aren't going to cut it for much longer.

"XML is being pitched as this Holy Grail of publishing, but the reality is always different," says Jurgen Kurz, Quark's vice president of product management. "Some of the tools aren't there yet in terms of editorial uses. In Avenue, we have a great product, but you need a foundation in place. As we progress, the real adoption will continue until XML, like PostScript, is in the background. When the tools are able to embed the technology very much behind the scenes, then the huge, wider adoption is possible."

And that's when the race to build XML tools will turn truly acrimonious. The hustle to create a standard within a standard--a set of XML commands that will be universal to publishing--is already under way by Adobe, which has partnered with Hewlett-Packard, RealNetworks, Interwoven, Nokia and ATG to build one. Quark professes to be unconcerned by Adobe's arms race, but Microsoft's broader XML plans are already coming under attack by competitors that recognize the importance of this new frontier.