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I'm old school here, and I suppose that if you count the SGML efforts
of the 1970s this may be the third wave, but as I see it the first
wave was the rise of desktop publishing, which arced from the early
1980s into around 1993 or so, which had a profound effect upon most
publishers. The web changed the dynamics in other ways, but oddly
enough it had comparatively little effect upon traditional paper
publishers in terms of technology (though a huge impact in terms of
competition with electronic media). However, XML is now becoming core
at just about every level of publishing, from document creation
through layout and formatting to pre-press, distribution and tracking,
and because of the open nature of such work I'm beginning to see
consolidation of standards at most stages of this process. If you
automate the actual press run (as is increasingly the case with the
newest print companies), then the very role of publishing companies as
"manufacturers" of books and magazines disappears, though their role
as filters of content are perhaps as important as ever).
I think you're seeing the result of that in the explosion of
self-published books, though admittedly the ones that are doing the
best are the ones in which the authors are also willing to put in the
work to market and promote the books. Right now, self-publishing is
still something of a ghetto, but I think this tends to be the case
with any new technology in which the traditional gatekeepers are
bypassed (think of the stigma that computer graphic artists had from
their blue-line and rubber cement crowd).
-- Kurt
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:33:32 +0000, Frans Englich
<frans.englich@telia.com> wrote:
> On Friday 28 January 2005 06:56, Kurt Cagle wrote:
> > Interesting conversation going on here. My experience with XML has
> > generally been just about the opposite of David's.
> >
> > Much of XML is disappearing into infrastructure, so that you're more
> > likely to work with it indirectly instead of directly unless you are a
> > real XML-zealot. Beyond the aforementioned web services, I find that
> > XML is making its way into application frameworks, publishing has
> > largely completed the first wave of migration to XML and is undergoing
> > a second
>
> From curiosity: what is the second wave the XML-publishing community is going
> through?
>
> > XML is found handling graphics in Linux (KDE 3.4 will be
> > largely SVG based)
>
> (I would be more conservative; the SVG support is a sub-set of the
> specification, only used for desktop-backgrounds, from what I know.)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Frans
>
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--
Kurt Cagle
http://www.understandingxml.com
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