Electronic Publishing -- SIMS 290
Dale Dougherty

Key Technology Trends

We're going to look at how three somewhat disjunct technology trends have shaped electronic publishing.

• Desktop Publishing
• Multimedia and CD-ROM
• Internet and the Web

Desktop Publishing

Key Technologies

The Apple LaserWriter, which may be as important as the Macintosh, was released in 1985. First ones cost $17,000.

Adobe and PostScript

Founded in 1982 by John Warnock, a Xerox Parc researcher who had worked on laser printers and page description languages.

PostScript

• a device-independent page description language
• vector-based font descriptions
• an interpreted graphics programming language; the interpreter is embedded in the device.

Page layout

The killer app of desktop publishing: What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG)

Later acquired by Adobe, Aldus retreated from its prominence -- Quark Xpress came to be the leading professional page layout solution.

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; the by-product is that information now exists electronically.

Problems in Desktop Publishing

Information Interchange

• So many different formats for text and images.
• Information tightly integrated with presentation.
• Software poses problems for reuse

Multimedia and CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A large capacity distribution medium in search of mixed-media content.

Microsoft a big supporter, primarily viewing it as a means for "bloatware" distribution.

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

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 as card fields
• Also supported sound, some animation and video
• Build links from card to card
• HyperTalk scripting for more complex development tasks.
• A million sold in first year (1987).
• Purists debate whether it is truly hypertext.

Other Hypermedia Systems

Owl's Guide

• Owl created first commercial hypertext system, released in 1986.
• Implemented the idea of stretch-text. A kind of outliner for presentations.
• Four classes of links; cursor changes when moved over link.

Intermedia

• Brown University's IRIS project, headed by Norman Meyrowitz

  "Our intention was to create a model for how 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" 38)" from Intermedia entry at the Electronic Labyrinth

• First used for an English course in 1987
• Commercial release in 1989 then development ends.

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

Key Multimedia Applications

Voyager

Beethoven's Ninth

Music, Art, Literature

Microsoft

Cinemania, Encarta

• Encarta puts traditional encyclopedia companies nearly out of business.

Broderbund

Myst

Family Tree Maker

 

 

Productivity applications

Broderbund has not been successful with "information" or "content" on CD other than games.

Doug Carlson, CEO of Broderbund, described a productivity application as one where the user adds the value by contributing his or her own information. (Family Tree).

Corporate Publishing Applications on CD

Defense Industry

Aircraft Maintenance Manuals

Fostered development of highly specialized, high-end "industrial" hypermedia software tools.

• Dynatext from EBT
• KMS (Knowledge Management Systems)

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.

High production costs for consumer products. Projects began to look more like "Hollywood" movie projects and 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

Also, UNIX

• Late 60's, early 70's grew out of AT&T Bell Labs
• Berkeley System Distribution (BSD)
• First Sun workstation in 1982
• Networking part of the operating system.

UNIX was unintentionally the anti-GUI.

Included tools for program development environment and text processing.

A philosophy of building small tools

Fostered a "hacker" development culture.

Internet and the Web

HTTP, HTML, and URLs

A simple protocol, a simple device-independent data format and a straightforward global addressing system.

HTML

The data now exists outside of the browser software required to access and display it; allows other programs besides browsers to access it.

URL -- Uniform Resource Locators.

Tim Berners-Lee key insight was a distributed hypertext system that did not have to know in advance whether a link reference could be resolved.

Disjunct Developments

It's interesting how separate these developments are.

The people and the companies which shaped these developments were starting new directions, deciding that what was essential involved ignoring much of what was there.

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

For instance, desktop publishing required a fine degree of control over presentation whereas the Web could live with a much cruder level of presentation.