SPECTRUM 2001 CONFERENCE NOTES

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Technology Connecting to the Market Digitally

Moderated By:

Amre Youssef
Director, Publishing Technology
Hearst Publications

[Notes were only taken during the last fifteen minutes of this session.]

Andrew Bart, President, Publishing Connections Inc. explained that XML is the key to E-book publishing and "re-deployment of content to the web." XML allows users to encode the content of the document, rather than the form, and in enable users to incorporate metadata, (e.g., data about the data that does not print), into documents. For instance PRISM can be included in documents for rights management of the information and syndication. XML is media independent and also follows open standards. This makes business-to-business exchange of data possible. It also allows for more effective search types in electronic media. Other benefits include eliminating the need to create content more than once for different media by enabling cross-media publishing. Currently products such as ave-nue.quark, which translates QPX files to XML, and other products such as iCPS provide XML support. In the future, Bart expects products such as Quark and InDesign to support XML in native form, with-out translation to their native formats.

XML reduces the cost of production, eliminates the manual translation of documents to HTML and supports rights management protection. It also creates new revenue streams by opening the doors to custom publishing, syndication, and by making digital assets accessible to a broader internal or exter-nal user base.

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