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This article is from April 18, 2000, and is no longer current.

Page Layout is a Dead-End Street

9

For a good laugh, try walking into a public library and asking if they have books that discuss the relative scratchiness of Ewok and Wookie fur. Of course, the laughter will be theirs — as they throw you out the door — because even if there were a book that explored this arcane subject, it would take nigh-on-forever to find it.
OK, now how would you find this subject on the Web? You might search AltaVista for “ewok wookie fur scratchiness” or type “How scratchy is Ewok fur?” into AskJeeves or Excite. But any seasoned Web-searcher will tell you that you’ll be lucky if you find an answer in any reasonable amount of time.
The problem: There’s just too much information out there, and while it’s easy to search for specific words or phrases, it’s relatively difficult to search for meaning.
Meaning is what XML is all about. If you’ve recently been sipping margaritas under a rock, XML is “extensible markup language,” and it looks kind of like HTML except that instead of saying what a bunch of data should look like (like describing the look of a Web page), XML describes what a bunch of data means. Once you have assigned meaning to content, you can specify rules for how that content should appear, depending on the medium you’re using.
Driving Down a Dead-End Street
Today, laying out a page in QuarkXPress, Adobe PageMaker, or Adobe InDesign is like driving a car down a dead-end street: It’s easy to do (though some tools let you get to the end of that street faster than others), but once you reach the end of the street, what can you do with your content?
Right now you have three options:

  • Exporting all your text from a page layout in ASCII or MS Word format is like disassembling the car, carting the pieces to another street, and trying to put it together somewhere else.
  • Exporting your content or even the look of the page as HTML is like driving in reverse until you get to the nearest intersection where you might be able to turn around.
  • The PDF format is like trying to make a U-turn, then putting your car on top of a flatbed truck and driving that around. No, there’s just no good way out once you’re facing a dead end. But that’s about to change.

The Next Generation of Publishing
While I don’t always agree with Quark’s position or vision, I am convinced that they’re doing something spectacular with QuarkXPress 5.0 and Avenue.Quark (yes, that’s really the name of the product) — they’re opening up the dead-end street and turning your page-layout program into just another stop along the way to wherever your content is going. The key is that they’re separating your content and the form it takes.
The trick is XML: By tagging text with XML, you give it meaning. Now you’ll be able to tell QuarkXPress how to translate meaning into form. For instance, once you tag a paragraph as a “first-level headline,” you can tell XPress to make headlines look like one thing when building a printed page, something else when building a page for the Web, and even more different when the headline appears on an e-book.
If this sounds like style sheets, it’s because the concept is basically the same: Assign a name to text (or graphics or whatever), and then change the definition of that word to suit your needs. The difference is in scope. Suddenly all your content can be tagged, and those tags can move from one program to another — into XPress and out again to be used someplace else. (Even, in theory, into future Adobe products.)
Giving Your Computer Eyes
One of the most exciting offshoots of XML is the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard, which lets you describe artwork and page geometry in the XML “language.” SVG will let you export not only your content from your applications, but also how the content looks. This might seem like a total contradiction to everything I’ve just been saying about separating content and form, but remember that you can choose to use or ignore all those tags later.
Note that both SVG and XML are public standards, and in fact Adobe and many other companies appear to be just as excited about them as Quark. SVG is written in XML, but not all XML-aware programs will be able to deal with it.
Here’s a few things you should be able to do with SVG:

  • Export an entire page from your page-layout program (even your plain ol’ page not built with XML) and reproduce it in an SVG-aware Web browser.
  • Search a database of the past issues of your magazine for “every story that was printed in an oval-shaped 20%-cyan box with a 2-point black frame in the past year.”
  • Import vector Web graphics onto your pages, converting them to native page objects that can be edited.
  • Build interactive buttons and other special effects using vector art (which is extremely compact) instead of raster art (which clogs up bandwidth).

In many ways, SVG may exponentially expand what you’ll be able to do with a next-generation page-layout or illustration application. Best of all, because XML and SVG are open standards, in theory everyone will be talking the same language, again freeing your content from the dead-end-street syndrome.
Brute Force versus Elegance
Plenty of folks have been taking about “cross publishing,” using the same content in multiple forms. But Quark’s idea of “media independent publishing” goes even further, where content and form are fully separate, and your documents can shape-shift depending on the medium and the message.
Of course, if only Quark were heading in this direction, I’d hardly care. Fortunately, a lot of people are looking toward this media independent future, where images, text, and rich media can be pulled from servers anywhere on the planet and given form based on intelligent rules, which are — in turn — based on meaning written in XML.
OK, maybe no one really cares about the relative scratchiness of ewok and wookie fur, but the not-too-distant future — in which data actually means something — is rich with possibilities, from powerful searches to flexible publishing.

David Blatner is the co-founder of the Creative Publishing Network, InDesign Magazine, CreativePro Magazine, and the author or co-author of 15 books, including Real World InDesign. His InDesign videos at LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) are among the most watched InDesign training in the world.
You can find more about David at 63p.com

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  • anonymous says:

    I have been in the Computer Design industry for quite some time now and have watched it through it’s stages and am always amazed at what companies are doing to make our lives easier! I worked in the Printing Industry for over four years and did nothing but fight with uneducated and educated designers poorly put together files. Something like XML could seriously help out those poor service providers out and limit the headaches. On the other hand it could turn into the same problem with the average idiot that thinks cause they have a computer and a couple adobe programs, that they can do marvelous work. Only time will tell…but the future is deffinately lookin brighter!

    CDE

  • anonymous says:

    I am dissapointed that David failed to mention that there are readily available applications out there that can accomplish what he mentions.

    Namely Corel Ventura Publisher (Xerox Ventura) He says that he failed to mention it because “the industry isn’t using it” obviously I’m not in the industry. What I think he meant to say was that Mac users don’t know about it.

  • anonymous says:

    I am disappointed to see that many who read this article would be led to believe that there are no applications currently out there that can address these problems. I took the liberty to contact David and he was most kind in responding that he knew that Corel Ventura (xerox ventura gold) can do all the above, however he wenton to say that the industry doesn’t use it (Corel Ventura) so he failed to mention it.
    I am sure that an additional sentence pointing out that there are applications available for those that are truly interested are available; would have been a great service, for those of us who are in the industry and are unaware that there is currently available technology to accomplish what he says you cant currently do.

    Thank You

  • anonymous says:

    While reading this article I thought David was unaware that there have been applications that can do all that and more. Upon sharing E-mails with David he assured me that he knew that Corel Ventura (xerox ventura gold) answered the questions he raised; but that he failed to mention it because the industry doesn’t use it.
    Well for those of us who would like to be able to do what David preaches…The application that no one uses is Corel Ventura Publisher.

  • anonymous says:

    The most important part of the future outlined by the article is that the
    standards would be open. It would obviate the advantage of a proprietary
    standard held by an Adobe or a Corel. It would mean that one could chose
    the tool best suited for a job by its strengths and one personal likes. It
    would also mean that information, our memes, would be more accessable.
    Istarted in this business with T-squares, drafting tables and rubber
    cement. If someone didn’t see something the first time it appeared, they
    missed it. If you needed the content in another form you had to do it again.
    Then came the electronic environment which was dominated by
    proprietary hardware and software. Better but still limited in output
    sharing. Now repurposing information is much easier and I applaude any
    further progress in that direction. .wIx.

  • anonymous says:

    XML still has a ways to go before it will be a viable solution. The meta tags assoiciated with it still need to have a common understanding among many users to aviod confusion. Further, page layout applications will always be in demand…printed magazines, books, etc. will always be a thriving business. The writer is trying to compare apples and oranges in many cases; for example, XML and pdf are two totally different technologies. The two will coexist and offer different solutions for different problems.

  • anonymous says:

    I tend to agree if cross-media publishing is your goal in purchasing the products mentioned. That’s to say if you advocate adhering to a process that’s based on print first, go to bits later. I also feel as though Adobe has dropped the ball with it’s acquisition of FrameMaker. They have been sitting on a page layout/SGML/XML tool but have failed to think about FrameMaker beyond it’s current install base and let it stagnate while focusing on InDesign and QuarkKillers. I also think that the larger market is not yet ready for some of this stuff.

  • anonymous says:

    The author of this article has good intentions and his perception is accurate, but maybe a bit naive? We have to take into account that there are many big corporations out there (maybe all of them?), trying to kill or incorporate the open standards discussed in the article. We all know wich companies I’m referring to, and we all know the reasons. To reach the “openness” visioned in this article, webdevelopers and designers have to start promoting the Open Source community and other independent standards-developers. It’s actually quite obvious, if you think about it. You can’t support the openness without supporting (and actively promoting) the standards.

    I’m not saying we should force everyone to use Netscape6, just because they are the good guys, because they are not. There are no “good” or “bad” guys in this situation. There are just companies, each trying to get a large peice of the cake. What I’m saying is that you should support ALL browsers (including Opera and Lynx) and conform to the current webb standards, because they belong to the same family of standards as XML and SVG.
    It is possible to do that without letting your design suffer, and it’s not that hard either. All it takes is a little discipline.

  • Anonymous says:

    Who cares about QuarkXPress vs. Adobe InDesign? XML changes everything.
    Written by David Blatner on April 18, 2000

    David’s article is dated April 18, 2000 and the comments are dated 2000 and 2001.
    What’s happened since then?
    Can anyone point us to significant more recent developments?
    Steve Dyson, Lisbon, Portugal

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