X marks the spot: Apple's Steve Jobs talks about Mac OS X (it's pronounced 'ohh-ess-ten') at the Seybold conference earlier this month. Photo: Seybold San Francisco 2000, courtesy of Einzig Photography.

Revitalized Seybold highlights old favorites XML, PDF, HTML

SAN FRANCISCO -- The conference at Seybold San Francisco, held here Aug. 28-Sept. 1, seemed to be particularly derivative -- everything that was said there had been said before.

And though the pundits may have heard the themes over and over again -- eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Portable Document Format (PDF), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) -- the crowd seemed to find it all new and exciting.

And while the concepts of on-line were dominant, every now and then a little bit about print would sneak into the proceedings.

The Seybold meeting had become somewhat schizophrenic in recent years, being unable to decide if it was a print show or a new-media show. It now seems to have figured out a way to scoot down the middle between the two, showing the new-media folks that the print guys have interesting ideas and, of course, exposing the flashy new-media stuff to the print people. (Conflict-of-interest alert: During the time that Seybold seemed to have lost its way, the editor of this journal was an adviser to the organization; once he ceased that activity, the conference seemed to regain its equilibrium. Coincidence? You decide.)

The methodology organizers have chosen is to divide the five-and-a-fraction days (there is now a Sunday night set of addresses) into three main tracks -- a "web" track (which deals with all things web-related), a "best practices" track (which is where the more technical issues of both print and web are discussed) and a "publishing strategies" track (which focuses on the print experience). Supplementing these are "special interest days" (which are meetings on specific topics such as e-books, PDF, XML and on-demand printing) and tutorials (which are half- or whole-day sessions focusing on tips and tricks for specific applications, such as Quark XPress and Adobe's Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat).

With more than 120 separate sessions ranging in length from 60 minutes to nine hours, there is no way we can even begin to cover everything that happened at the Seybold San Francisco conference. These are not necessarily the high points (nor low), just the things that struck the fancy of one attendee.

iSteve
As someone in the vast crowd (estimated at more than 10,000) said, seeing a presentation by Steve Jobs -- chief executive of Apple Computer Inc. -- is worth the price of admission alone.

Fortunately, this time anyway, access to the speech was free.

Though Jobs rehashed much of the same presentation he gave at the Macworld conference held in July, he did make news with his announcement that the public beta version of Mac OS X -- the company's long awaited next-generation operating system for Macintosh -- would be available on Sept. 13.

Jobs called the operating system "the future of the Macintosh."

The Apple chief executive spent considerable time on the new operating system, demonstrating it himself and showing features such as the Dock (a graphical, enhanced version of Mac OS 9's "recent documents" and "recent applications" Apple Menu folders which resides on the bottom of the screen), desktop transparency and an improved Finder. In earlier iterations of the operating system, Finder worked more like the NeXT operating system (called OpenStep), from whence Mac OS X is derived, than the traditional Mac OS, causing complaints from early testers. Apple engineers have now made things in the Finder and on the desktop operate in a more traditional manner.

Jobs also attempted to demonstrate Mac OS X running on a PowerBook laptop computer; he wanted to illustrate how quickly a machine that was in the sleep mode could wake up. Unfortunately, the machine refused to cooperate and Jobs was left to say, "When it works, it wakes up in one second -- except for that one."

Following Jobs' demonstration of the operating system, a developer that had an application that would run on OS X, Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco, showed its Dreamweaver web-page development program running under the new operating system. The company showed the building of a dynamic web site that used numerous variables that could be input by users.

Preceding that, Jobs focused on the latest hardware that the company has released. Opening up a new slot in the product grid, the company has introduced its new G4 Cube, an impossibly small and attractive high-powered computer. Designed to complement the company's flat panel displays, the G4 Cube is aimed at corporate users who want the power of a tower machine without giving up the office or desk space.

The company had also announced its multiprocessor strategy in July (wherein the top two G4 tower configurations come with two central processing units instead of one, at the same price as the previously single-processor systems), and Jobs gave a similar demonstration as he has in the past, comparing not only Macintoshes with Windows' machines using Intel chips, but also comparing the new multiprocessor Mac against the Wintel machine. Running some standard recorded steps in Photoshop 5.5, the original G4 tower outpaced the Wintel machine by nearly 50 percent; running on the new multiprocessor G4 tower, the result was again a doubling of speed.

Jobs also allowed Adobe Systems Inc. to demonstrate the newest incarnation of its venerable Photoshop -- Version 6 -- on the new G4 dual-processor machine.

Combustion, the video editing application from Discreet Logic Inc. of Montreal, was also demonstrated on a multiprocessor Mac. Formerly, Discreet only shipped Combustion for high-priced Silicon Graphics workstations.

At present, only applications specifically designed to run on multiprocessor machines can benefit from the second chip. Mac OS X will bring the advantage of "two brains," as Jobs called it, to all applications.

Smackdown challenge
The last meeting before the wrap-up session for the publishing strategies track was the Quark XPress versus Adobe InDesign "shoot-out." The fatigue of a week of new media and print technology discussions gave the session a slightly giddy air, with the participants taking on the demeanor of players in the World Wrestling Federation.

The concept was simple: two experts in each application -- none affiliated with the makers -- were given alternating opportunities to pick and demonstrate a feature in their favored product. The competition then had to respond with a similar feature or an excuse. Then the audience of about 150 voted which product handled the feature better. Catcalls from the audience were encouraged; you got a free T-shirt for making a salient observation.

After a couple of rounds that went immediately to InDesign, Scorekeeper Gary Adcock said, "This is not a shoot-out; it's a mugging."

InDesign partisan Sandee Cohen (in real life a writer of books on desktop publishing and trainer in the field) chose optical character alignment as one of her first features to highlight.

XPress patriot David Blatner (another desktop publishing book writer and trainer), feebly countered that using InDesign's optical character alignment (which is a setting for fine typography, such as what would be used in advertising) made the application run "too slow." He went on to point out that because XPress can't handle many fine typography issues and that the application is so ubiquitous "we've had type looking this way so long that [optical character alignment] doesn't look right."

Score one for InDesign.

Blatner's next feature was XPress' 4.11 facility to mix spot colors; Cohen's weak argument was that it was a "powerful feature that can create a lot of mud."

Score one for XPress.

Cohen pointed to InDesign's ability to edit Photoshop original documents from within the application; Blatner moaned, "I don't want my images updating automatically."

And on it went. Over the 80-odd minutes of the session, XPress excelled in seven of the features while InDesign was favored in nine.

Midway through the shoot-out, amidst some jubilation when InDesign won a feature, Scorekeeper Adcock said, "At the end of the day, you're all going to go home and use Quark XPress." Everyone laughed, a little nervously in some cases.

Countering deconstruction
"A picture may be worth 1000 words, but so is 1000 words." This line was uttered early on in a session called, "The Economics of Cross-Media Publishing." The speaker meant that every effort should be expended to capture words and pictures in a manner so that they could be used -- and reused -- in multiple media.

Saying that cross-media publishing counters the trend of "deconstruction" of print publications for reuse, Cimmeron Buser of the XML-outsourcing company Texterity Inc. of Southborough, Mass., pointed out that "when you make that XML page, you can pretty much generate anything from it automatically."

Buser went on to say that publishers could only economically operate in the future if they move to a "media neutral" creation environment, so that no energy is expended in, for example, stripping text out of a Quark XPress page.

"It's going to cost you an additional $2.50 to $25 per page to give that information structure if you do it after the fact," Buser said.

He did acknowledge that "deconstruction" was a viable alternative for some publishers, especially those whose "time to market is not crucial for their electronic versions."

Longtime newspaper-industry supplier executive Frank Rizzo explained to the crowd that he has a nameless client that has 80-plus business-to-business periodicals and that each of those "does his own thing" in terms of new media.

"There are huge costs for bringing more sites on-line," said Rizzo, the head of Agile Enterprise Inc. of Nashua, N.H., a subsidiary of Applied Graphics Technologies Inc. of New York.

To achieve greater efficiency and reduce costs, the general recommendation was for "children, share your toys -- oh, and use the troops you have."

Saying that too often "data is trapped in desktop publishing files," Rizzo pointed out that in the new world of publishing, "the focus is not just on the outcome."

Further, Rizzo said, "Publishers are beginning to realize that the information on the information is important and it must be captured at the creation point."

This "metadata" -- the information about the information -- can be easily captured at the front end of the process, Rizzo said, and illustrated his point with screens from his TeamBase editorial front-end system.

"The contract with editorial is that we'll find them a tool to make compelling content but that will capture this metadata without slowing you down," said Rizzo.

No silver bullet
With the provocative session title "Does XML Matter?" two people who ought to know -- a developer of digital asset management systems and a programmer from a large publishing house -- seemed to think the answer was "no."

"Unless," qualified Scott Bowen, president and chief operating officer of Artesia Technologies Inc. of Rockville, Md., "data interchange is a key requirement in your business ... between you and your customer-partner supply chain or across disparate platforms."

Despite this, Bowen pointed out for most, "Your organization can't afford the labor-intensive practices of HTML."

Bowen, whose company has developed the Teams digital asset management system that is in use at the Washington Post, said that his own anecdotal research has shown that 75 percent of the Fortune 500 companies "are using or have begun an investigation of XML."

And, to bolster that, he points out that seven of the top eight software companies in the country -- Microsoft, Oracle, Computer Associates, CompuWare, PeopleSoft, BMC Software and Novell -- have XML offerings.

"At the end of the day," Bowen said, "format is going to be important if I'm going to display this content in a visual manner."

Answering the question of whether XML matters, Kip Wheeler of business software developer J.D. Edwards said, "only a little."

Wheeler, a programmer and project manager in the documentation group of the Denver-based J.D. Edwards, gave a tool analogy. "If XML is a good hammer, that means it's a bad screwdriver and an even lousier pair of pliers."

Contending, "98 percent of all content is authored in [Microsoft] Word," Wheeler said that Word was a poor XML tool. "Word is extremely permissive; a good XML tool says that what isn't explicitly allowed isn't."

There are hidden costs in switching from your proprietary publishing tool -- Wheeler cited Adobe FrameMaker -- to an XML environment. "Legacy documents are why XML is the consultant's dream -- migration is a difficult process," Wheeler said.

-- dmc

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-4281;
Agile Enterprise Inc.,
(603) 880-6440,
e-mail: ttlynch@agileenterprise.com;
Apple Computer Inc.,
(408) 974-4611;
Applied Graphics Technologies,
(212) 716-6600,
e-mail: info@agt.com;
Artesia Technologies Inc.,
(301) 548-4000,
e-mail: info@artesiatech.com;
Discreet Logic Inc.,
(514) 393-1616,
e-mail: product_info@discreet.com;
J.D. Edwards Corp.,
(303) 334-4000;
Macromedia Inc.,
(415) 252-2000;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888,
e-mail: aselvia@quark.com;
Texterity Inc.,
(508) 804-3000,
e-mail: info@texterity.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.