Forecasts

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A New Name for Graphic Standards
- Meta Data

Trudy Levy
Image Integration

Now to those librarians in the audience, the original information managers, Meta Data is not a new term, but to the rest of us it sounds like a new Pokemon creature. It is however a term which we need to make one of our own, because it is acquiring great importance in the publishing world. Meta data is data about data. For an image file it might be the resolution of the file. If you accept that an image is information or data, then the resolution of that image is data further defining data. Or it might be the size of an image such as 100 pixel by 150 pixel. Some of us establish these as graphic standards and create styles and style sheets for publishing purposes. Now there is a means to communicate these standards or meta data about our files across platforms and even between software programs, It is called XML.

What is XML? It stands for Extensible Markup language and is a subset of SGML - the Standard Generalized Markup Language. To borrow from the excellent A Gentle Introduction to SGML :

"SGML is an international standard for the definition of device-independent, system-independent methods of representing texts in electronic form. More exactly, SGML is a meta language, that is, a means of formally describing a language, in this case, a markup language.

Before going any further we should define these terms. Historically, the word markup has been used to describe annotation or other marks within a text intended to instruct a compositor or typist how a particular passage should be printed or laid out. Examples include wavy underlining to indicate boldface, special symbols for passages to be omitted or printed in a particular font and so forth. As the formatting and printing of texts was automated, the term was extended to cover all sorts of special markup codes inserted into electronic texts to govern formatting, printing, or other processing."

So SGML is a standard which permits you to communicate with your electronic equipment, be it printer or display device, the form in which you wish to have your work presented. An application of SGML with which many of you may be familiar is HTML- the hypertext markup language used by web browsers. HTML tells a web browser to display a text as bold when it is bracketed like this -<b> Display as bold </b>. While XML is often compared to HTML, it is not an application like HTML but a subset of SGML. The difference is that applications are made using XML and these use a language which is Extensible or can be extended.

One concept for a publishing application using XML is to create one content file and publish it anywhere without reformatting. For example, in your desktop publishing software you create one style for Titles, another for bylines, another for body and an image format. In your web software you create the same styles, but in a format that fits that medium. When you move a file with these styles contained as an XML file, the appearance would change to agree with the publishing method, but the content would be untouched. In fact that file becomes platform and application independent. Any application which can read XML will publish the title according to the style definition and so on and so on. You do not need to reformat it or apply styles to it. Nor would you need to keep multiple copies. The file is independent of individual software commands regarding formatting. The styles determine the format and that style setting can be communicated to any production program which can read XML

As this is the Forecasting column it might be assumed this is all happening in the future, but actually several software companies are in the process of developing such applications in XML. Those which are doing it for purposes of web publishing are Vignette, Arbortext, Inso Corp, and UserLand Software . Also QuarkXPress has developed avenue.quark - a new Quark product that will let you tag the content of your QuarkXPress documents ( even old ones) and then extract that content in XML format. They are working with Vignette¹s STORYTELLER which to create web pages from XML files of QuarkXPress documents.

What this does mean for you now? Managing Meta Data assumes you have some consistent meta data to manage. We all know that consistent use of styles and standards makes a consistent product, but how many times have we tweaked that standard for a unique effect? If we are to take true advantage of the benefits of technology, we must standardized whenever possible without losing our spark. Are your files ready for the time when maintaining your graphic standards will mean greater flexibility in publishing?

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11/00/99
 
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