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Technology Trends

Week 3

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Key Technology Developments We're going to look at how

somewhat disjunct technology trends have shaped electronic publishing. Desktop Publishing Markup Systems Hypermedia & Multimedia (CD-ROM) Online Services Web

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Making the Unreal into Reality

“In early 1968 we made the rounds of The New York Times and Time/Life. And we found that our system was essentially too complex for them to understand. Remember that these people were producing magazines and newspapers and other forms of printed material. At most they had typographic programs that set type and maybe some software that did display ad management. …

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But the idea of sitting on-line behind a tube and actually authoring and editing and rearranging and cross-referencing really was more than they were willing to believe you needed to do or should do. It was ‘very interesting.’

I remember this particular demo we did at Time/Life when our audience said, "That's great, but it will take us at least 10 years before people will be willing to sit down behind tubes and do anything on-line."

• Andries van Dam, Hypertext Keynote

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Desktop Publishing Macintosh Bit-mapped Display The Graphical User Interface (GUI) Laser Printers Page Description Languages

(PostScript) Page Layout Programs

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Apple, Adobe and Aldus Three companies shaped desktop

publishing, which might have been more appropriately called desktop production.

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Apple: 1984 Apple

commercialized several new technologies in the Macintosh, which was released in 1984. Famous 1984

Commercial

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LaserWriter The Apple

LaserWriter, which was nearly as important as the Macintosh, was released in 1985. First ones cost

$17,000.

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Adobe Generates PostScript

Founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Xerox PARC researchers who had worked on laser printers and page description languages.

From “Inside the Publishing Revolution”

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PostScript a device-independent page

description language vector-based font descriptions an interpreted graphics

programming language; the interpreter is embedded in the device.

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WYSIWYGWhat You See is What You

Get Aldus Pagemaker

• Page layout• Later acquired by Adobe,

Aldus retreated from its prominence –

Quark Xpress came to be the leading professional page layout solution.

Adobe’s InDesign so-called “Quark killer.”

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Desktop Publishing Automates the process of publishing:

editing, layout and typesetting of publications.

Results in lower production costs. Reduces the time-to-market by eliminating

steps in the production process. Enables any organization and any individual

to create high quality publications. The Product is print; as a by-product,

information exists electronically.

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Markup Systems Batch Formatting Systems

Troff TeX and LaTeX RTF

Generalized Markup SGML XML

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Batch Formatting Analogous to source code Formatter interprets source and

creates output for a specific print device.

Troff (typesetting) Nroff (screen-based)

Example: Man Pages

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SGML Standard Generalized Markup

Language Came out of IBM (GML) and

standardized by Charles Goldfarb. • Became an ISO standard in 1986

Really a language for defining markup languages.

Assumes a batch processing model.

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Structural Markup Use markup to identify the structural

elements of a document; a tree structure. Separate presentation from content

Allow the same content to reused in different contexts.

Style sheets contain formatting instructions that are associated each element.

Make it easier to exchange documents among different parties.

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DTD Document Type Definitions

A way to define a set of elements to be used in the markup of a class of documents and the hierarchical relationships among these elements.

Assumed that communities/industries would standardizes on DTDs for interchange.

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SGML Publishing Applications Met Needs of Defense Industry

E.g. Aircraft Maintenance Manuals Fostered development of highly

specialized, high-end "industrial" hypermedia software tools. Dynatext from EBT KMS (Knowledge Management Systems) Atex

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Davenport Group Started in 1988, looked at domain of

technical documentation, mostly for software.

Docbook DTD emerged from this process.

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Problems with SGML SGML tools were expensive and

complex. Print formatting solutions were not

practical. DTDs were difficult to develop. Primarily designed for text-based

information.

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Electronic Documents The battle over formats

Markup• Identify semantics• Reuse

• From SGML to XML

Presentation• Page Fidelity

• From Postscript to PDF

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XML• An improved version of SGML developed

at the W3C

• Move beyond the browser Separate content from presentation

Make possible multiple delivery methods

Documents vs. Data

Messaging formats

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Hypermedia Systems Integration of text, graphics, and sound as

objects or components of a document. Compound Documents

These components can be linked together in a variety of ways.

Focused on publishing information as a groupware application.

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Intermedia

Research Project at Brown University

Timeline Begun as a project with Ted Nelson and Andries Van Dam in

1968; Nelson became “disillusioned” with it and left.

First used for an English course in 1987

IRIS project, headed by Norman Meyrowitz

Commercial release in 1989

Development ends around 1992.

Outline View, Web View

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Intermedia

Windowing Model "hypermedia functionality should be

handled at the system level, where linking would be available for all participating applications in much the same way that copying to and pasting from the clipboard facility is supported in the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows environments. ("IRIS Hypermedia Services" p. 38)" from Intermedia entry at the Electronic Labyrinth

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Other Hypermedia Systems Owl's Guide

Owl created first commercial hypertext system, released in 1986, as a productivity application.

Implemented the idea of stretch-text. A kind of outliner for presentations.

Four classes of links; cursor changes when moved over link.

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HyperCard The most popular and practical

implementation of hypermedia • Developed by Bill Atkinson at Apple.• Used a stack of cards as central metaphor• Organized images and text• Also supported sound, some animation and

video• A million sold in first year (1987).• Purists debated whether it is truly

hypertext.

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Hypertext ’87 Keynote

“HyperCard, despite all its limitations, is beautifully engineered, and has a wonderful user interface, especially for hypertext-style linking. It will really acculturate our computer user community. It is simple enough, despite its complexity, that a lot of people can get access to it at a relatively simple level. It's a fraction of what Doug and Ted and others of us believe to be the potential of hypertext or hypermedia.” Andries van Dam; Keynote.

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HyperCard As Browser A single program used to access

different kinds of content. Authoring and linking model was

simple. Scriptable

Hypertalk language was a precursor to Javascript.

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CD-ROM A large capacity distribution medium in

search of mixed-media content. Microsoft a big supporter, primarily

viewing it as a means for software distribution. But also produced products like Cinemania.

A packaged product that blurs the line between software and "content."

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Macromedia Macromedia's Director became the

high-end authoring tool for CD-ROM development.

A lot like HyperCard but more powerful and complex to learn. Lingo programming language like

HyperTalk Head of Development at Macromedia

is now Norman Meyerowitz

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A Few Key Multimedia Applications Voyager

Beethoven Hard Day’s Night

Microsoft Cinemania

Corbis A Place For Art

All in One A Day in Thailand

Broderbund Myst

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Productivity applications Broderbund has not been successful

with "information" or "content" on CD other than games. Doug Carlston, ex-CEO of Broderbund,

described a productivity application as one where the user adds the value by contributing his or her own information. (Family Tree).

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Broderbund 1997 Sales of $190M % of total Productivity 56 Education 27 Entertainment 13 Affiliated labels 4

Total 100

Sold to Learning Company for $420 in 1998.

“Broderbund's first big hit came in 1984 with Print Shop. The next year it released Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? The company went public in 1991, and the following year it acquired PC Globe, an electronic atlas publisher. Broderbund also expanded its list of affiliated labels (software it distributes exclusively for other publishers) and in 1994 formed a joint venture with Random House to create Living Books, a line of interactive children's storybook CD-ROMs.” Source: Hoover’s.

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CD-ROM Issues Convergence of imaging,

animation, audio and video technologies, while ongoing difficulty in standards and interoperability.

Content unavailable outside of proprietary program; programs dedicated to one body of content.

Biggest success in games and educational software.

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Additional CD-ROM Issues High production costs for consumer

products. • Projects began to look more like "Hollywood"

movie projects and did not meet with success. (12-18 months of effort; $5-10 million budget.)

Difficulty of developing distribution channels• bookstores were not successful selling CD-

ROMs.• software stores also had difficulty

Continued use for data distribution.

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Online Services

Two ends of the spectrum. Consumer Professional

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Consumer Online Services CompuServe (founded 1969) AOL (1985) Prodigy, MSN

Dial up access User-created content &

communityBulletin-boards/Conferencing/Forums

Email, Chat

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Professional Online Services Mead-Data Lexis-Nexis

Required specially trained experts to perform searches

Research oriented and publication focused.

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Early Internet Systems Ftp Gopher

University of Minnesota Menu-based access to text files

Wais Wide-Area Information System Search engine by Brewster Kahle

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The Web Tim Berners-Lee at CERN invents

the Web as a global hypertext system utilizing the Internet.

Submits paper to HyperText Conference in 1991; it’s rejected.

NCSA begins Mosaic development in 1993.

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Simple Standards HTTP, HTML, and URLs A simple protocol, a simple device-

independent data format and a straightforward global addressing system.

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HTML The data now exists outside of the

browser software required to access and display it; allows other programs besides browsers to access it.

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URL -- Uniform Resource Locators. Tim Berners-Lee key insight was

that a distributed hypertext system did not have to know in advance whether a link reference could be resolved.

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Reshaping Distribution The Web’s most significant contribution is

establishing ubiquitous point-to-point distribution.

E-commerce: The Web became its own channel.

Relatively low cost for development. Wide range of applications beyond

publishing.

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New Directions Streaming Media Rich Media (Flash) Peer To Peer

Napster et. al• Clients become servers.

Web Services Automating the exchange of information

among web applications.• Servers talk to servers.

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ConclusionsDisjunct Developments The development of desktop publishing,

CD-ROM and the Web seem to be separate paths. The people and the companies that shaped

these developments were starting off in new directions, deciding that what was essential involved ignoring much of what was there.

Also, those companies heavily invested in one remained skeptical that "the next thing" was real.

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Desktop publishing requires a fine degree of control over presentation; so did CD-ROM.

Hypermedia on CD-ROM introduced basic forms of interactivity.

The Web began with more basic forms of content, presentation and interactivity.

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A CD-ROM was a packaged good. Lacked an established distribution

channel. Web content is not really packaged.

Online service model Advertising

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Collaborative Development Web development benefited from

people who had experience in desktop publishing, markup systems, hypermedia, and CD-ROM authoring.

Confluence of creative and technical capabilities.