XML WORKFLOW

The Old Way

Perhaps some will recall the battle of the desktop windowing systems from the early 90s. Display Postscript, a window description language promoted by Adobe and used by Sony Corp in its PCs, was up against Microsoft Windows. Display Postscript’s big advantage was its screen font handling (these were the days before True Type, Open Type etc.). But it was slow, didn’t have good application support and required a license from Adobe. We all know who won that battle and it was years before Sony was able to return to the PC marketplace with a Windows-based offering. Lesson: the choice of underlying technology is critical. For your communications platform, that choice is just as important.

PDF Workflow for Multi-channel Communications?

Anyone coming from the print (aka paper) world knows that the PDF format is the standard for transferring the description of a page or document to a printing device. Its universal acceptance in the print world has made PDF a tempting choice for marketers looking to move from print to interactive and online mediums. And we’ve all heard about the so-called PDF workflow. But just like postscript was an excellent technology for printing from a digital source in the 90s, but an equally terrible technology for a windowing system, PDF is a great output format for printed communications but has many glaring shortcomings as a candidate for a multi-channel communications workflow. It’s bulky. It doesn’t edit well. It requires a platform-specific helper application to view. A far better workflow language is XML, and this is the description language used by IMR.

XML is:

• Portable across browsers and platforms
• Flexible and extensible to emerging communication mediums
• Powerful enough to describe the most complex pages
• Can be interpreted without a helper application (Acrobat) by internet browsers