Technology Trends
Week 3
1
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

2
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. …
3


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
4
Desktop Publishing
Macintosh Bit-mapped Display
 The Graphical User Interface (GUI)
 Laser Printers
 Page Description Languages (PostScript)
 Page Layout Programs

5
Apple, Adobe and Aldus

Three companies shaped desktop
publishing, which might have been more
appropriately called desktop production.
6
Apple: 1984

Apple
commercialized
several new
technologies in the
Macintosh, which
was released in
1984.

Famous 1984
Commercial
7
LaserWriter

The Apple
LaserWriter,
which was nearly
as important as
the Macintosh, was
released in 1985.

First ones cost
$17,000.
8
Adobe Generates
PostScript

From “Inside the Publishing Revolution”
Founded in 1982 by
John Warnock and
Charles Geschke,
Xerox PARC
researchers who had
worked on laser
printers and page
description
languages.
9
PostScript
a device-independent page
description language
 vector-based font descriptions
 an interpreted graphics
programming language; the
interpreter is embedded in the
device.

10
WYSIWYG
What 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.”
11
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.
12
Markup Systems


Batch Formatting Systems

Troff

TeX and LaTeX

RTF
Generalized Markup

SGML

XML
13
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
14
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.

15
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.
16
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.

17
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

18
Davenport Group
Started in 1988, looked at domain of
technical documentation, mostly for
software.
 Docbook DTD emerged from this
process.

19
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.

20
Electronic Documents

The battle over formats

Markup
• Identify semantics
• Reuse
• From SGML to XML

Presentation
• Page Fidelity
• From Postscript to PDF
21
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
22
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.
23
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
24
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
25
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.

26
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.
27
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.
28
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.
29
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."
30
Macromedia
Macromedia's Director became the highend 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
31
A Few Key Multimedia
Applications

Voyager


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Microsoft

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A Place For Art
All in One

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Cinemania
Corbis

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Beethoven
Hard Day’s Night
A Day in Thailand
Broderbund

Myst
32
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).
33
Broderbund
1997 Sales of $190M

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% 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.
34
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.
35
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. (1218 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.
36
Online Services
Two ends of the spectrum.
 Consumer
 Professional
37
Consumer Online Services

CompuServe (founded 1969)

AOL (1985)

Prodigy, MSN

Dial up access

User-created content & community
Bulletin-boards/Conferencing/Forums
Email, Chat
38
Professional Online Services
Mead-Data
 Lexis-Nexis

Required specially trained experts to
perform searches
 Research oriented and publication
focused.

39
Early Internet Systems
Ftp
 Gopher

University of Minnesota
 Menu-based access to text files


Wais
Wide-Area Information System
 Search engine by Brewster Kahle

40
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.
41
Simple Standards
HTTP, HTML, and URLs
 A simple protocol, a simple deviceindependent data format and a
straightforward global addressing system.

42
HTML

The data now exists outside of the
browser software required to access and
display it; allows other programs besides
browsers to access it.
43
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.
44
Reshaping Distribution

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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.
45
New Directions

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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.
46
Conclusions
Disjunct Developments
 The development of desktop publishing, CDROM 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.
47

Desktop publishing requires a fine degree
of control over presentation; so did CDROM.

Hypermedia on CD-ROM introduced
basic forms of interactivity.

The Web began with more basic forms of
content, presentation and interactivity.
48

A CD-ROM was a packaged good.


Lacked an established distribution channel.
Web content is not really packaged.

Online service model

Advertising
49
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.

50