> Layout and design creates book covers and selects type.
Really, as a designer, you should know that designers do more for interiors than just “select type.” When we get to design interiors, we actually design them, which goes much beyond just selecting type.
@xmlgeek: All fair points. XML is an admirable starting point for open, interoperable formats that can survive archival pretty well. I’m fond of using plain text as much as possible when considering the long term.
But technical writing is a very different beast from complex page layout software. And while standard publishing may be a solved problem for the former, it is far from it for the latter. That is what this essay concerns — and its publication in A List Apart was in part because the same issues are addressed by modern web developers.
To be clear, I’m not advocating ePub 3 as The One True Path where everyone must fall in line. ePub 3 is the best way to handle modern digital publishing concerns right now, and the best hope to spread across e-reading platforms right now. That will change someday. When that day comes, we’ll hopefully have conversion tools and an easy way to read older formats —Â and (to be heinously reductive about it) I reckon that’s roughly how the web plays out today.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
xmlgeek
@Nick, I must disagree. We’ve been producing some very sophisticated page layouts from XML for quite some time. Whether you’re using XSL-FO, SDL’s XPP, importing into InDesign, or any other method of your choosing – it’s been being published from SGML/XML sources for a couple of decades.
bowerbird, web developers don’t manage the web, they’d like to, but it’s companies that do. However, being a web developer, there’s something to be said for a “screwed up” web that requires people to “hire costly experts”…
16 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleQuadrat
> Layout and design creates book covers and selects type.
Really, as a designer, you should know that designers do more for interiors than just “select type.” When we get to design interiors, we actually design them, which goes much beyond just selecting type.
Nick Disabato
@xmlgeek: All fair points. XML is an admirable starting point for open, interoperable formats that can survive archival pretty well. I’m fond of using plain text as much as possible when considering the long term.
But technical writing is a very different beast from complex page layout software. And while standard publishing may be a solved problem for the former, it is far from it for the latter. That is what this essay concerns — and its publication in A List Apart was in part because the same issues are addressed by modern web developers.
To be clear, I’m not advocating ePub 3 as The One True Path where everyone must fall in line. ePub 3 is the best way to handle modern digital publishing concerns right now, and the best hope to spread across e-reading platforms right now. That will change someday. When that day comes, we’ll hopefully have conversion tools and an easy way to read older formats —Â and (to be heinously reductive about it) I reckon that’s roughly how the web plays out today.
dror1180
hi
its may sound funy but i think thet Since technically we all work in publishing
dror
xmlgeek
@Nick, I must disagree. We’ve been producing some very sophisticated page layouts from XML for quite some time. Whether you’re using XSL-FO, SDL’s XPP, importing into InDesign, or any other method of your choosing – it’s been being published from SGML/XML sources for a couple of decades.
migue26222
First time I read your blog, and it is really amazing. And actually you are tottally right “Since technically we all work in publishing”.
Mykola
bowerbird, web developers don’t manage the web, they’d like to, but it’s companies that do. However, being a web developer, there’s something to be said for a “screwed up” web that requires people to “hire costly experts”…