Quark is taking its first step to support XML as a way to output Quark documents to the Web. Quark's Xpress publishing software is used by desktop publishers and newspapers
The announcement will be made at the Seybold 21st Century Publishing Conference in San Francisco. In addition, Quark will announce a partnership with Vignette. The partnership will ensure that Quark Xpress will be able to connect directly into the Vignette StoryServer product to share XML content.
"We'll be demonstrating this at the Seybold conference," says Mark Lemmons, director of Quark's Internet publishing group. "With the advent of the Web, people needed to run somewhat parallel publishing processing for the Web."
XML is a format-neutral document markup language being standardized under the aegis of the World Wide Web Consortium, which Quark joined a year ago. XML uses the concept of semantic metatags around content for easy searching and format conversion.
Quark will be showing how Xpress can output content in XML so that the files can be accepted by other document-conversion systems. Lemons admits that at present, it is an awkward process to convert Xpress documents into Web formats.
Quark has chosen to partner specifically with Vignette on XML integration because Quark found Vignette's XML-based StoryServer to be well suited technically. "We also have a shared customer base," Lemmons adds.
StoryServer plays the role of an application server for Web publishing by providing back-end ties to databases and a method for recombining content to personalize it for the Web visitor.
Quark and Vignette plan to work on designing bi-directional feeds between products. While beta versions of the collaboration will be available soon, the fruits of the labor are not expected in full until early next year.
"Sounds like a win-win for both," commented Giga Information Group analyst Phil Costa. "One of the problems people face is trying to get content out onto the Internet" The Quark-Vignette deal "is going to create a more seamless stream of information from the tools content creators use to the engines used to deploy that content."
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