February 1999, Vol. 10, No. 2

Alphabet soup II

New standards in news and ads making their way to you soon

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that in American life, there are no second acts. The famous writer, who had more than a passing acquaintance with Hollywood, surely must have understood that the sequel is the

quintessential American act.

And so it comes to the world of publishing technology: SGML, the tagging language that wouldn't die, has returned (in the guise of XML) in two new newspaper industry "standards."

If you've been spending too much time focusing on the follies of the three branches of the U.S. government, maybe you don't know that SGML stands for "Standardized General Markup Language" and XML stands for "eXtensible Markup Language." XML is a superset of SGML -- that is, it’s based on SGML, but avoids much of Sgml’s hassles.

I'd like to say that it’s all alphabet soup to me, but I've said that before and no one believed me then (see The Cole Papers, August 1993).

Now, a band of newspaper futurists -- dare I say "visionaries?" -- has come together under the auspices of the Media Center of the American Press Institute to create something they call "News Markup Language" or NML.

Chris Feola, a correspondent here whose day job is running the Media Center, says NML "is designed to capture the knowledge of the newsroom and store that knowledge digitally. It would, for example, designate what is the lede, what is the nut graf and what is a parenthetical aside. There’s also a demand for a tag that marks ’58-paragraph narrative ledes that back into the story.'"

My first question was, "What’s the difference between NML and UTF?" Again, for the soup-impaired, the Universal Text Format is something that the Newspaper Association of America’s Wire Service Committee -- in conjunction with the International Press Telecommunications Council (Iptc, natch) -- has been working on to allow for the sophisticated transmission and tagging of news stories (see The Cole Papers, May 1994).

Turns out that UTF pretty much leaves open how to implement the functionality that NML provides.

Feola told me his group is working with the NAA Wire Service Committee, the Associated Press and other organizations "to ensure the NML will work smoothly with existing standards such as the wire header."

Inside, you'll find J.T. "Tom" Johnson’s coverage of the latest NML meeting and how the ad hoc group is building up NML.

But news isn't the only thing affected by XML -- classified advertising is in the loop as well. Also inside, you'll see my report on how the NAA’s Classified Ad Task Force put together (in record time) an XML DTD (don't ask) to allow easy transmission of classified liners between advertisers and publishers and then between publishers and on-line aggregators.

Together, these two developments mean that XML will become a part of newspapering’s daily life. Much the same as the short history of PDF (that’s the Portable Document Format, which is Adobe’s Acrobat technology that allows display advertising, and other PostScript elements, to be distributed easily), XML -- foreign to the vast majority of newspapers today -- will become the lingua franca of the newspaper of the future.

Also inside, you'll find Correspondent George Powell’s report on Macworld Expo. For a writer who believed that the last few Macworld gatherings were much like funerals, Powell is notably restrained in his glee with the newfound success of the Macintosh platform.

Lastly, I visit two industry meetings, held uncoincidentally in Florida in mid-January -- the NAA’s SuperConference (which provided interesting insights into the supplier world, specifically comments made by Quark Inc.’s new chief operating officer), and the annual Harris Publishing Systems Corp.’s seminar (this year devoted to advertising technology -- a fascinating set of speakers).

Fitzgerald was certainly mistaken with his comment on subsequent acts; I doubt that it will be long before you see "Alphabet soup III."

-- David M. Cole