Slide 11
Slide 11 text
XML
I N P U B L I S H I N G
At the turn of the century, I was working in publishing. Specifically, electronic publishing. Even MORE specifically,
ebooks. And while some of the big journal publishers climbed onto the XML bandwagon, many other journals
didn’t, and the trade publishing industry just never did. I remember sitting in an ebook conference next to a high-
level editor from a Big New York Publisher, and we were listening to a fairly basic, fairly standard introduction to
XML, and I heard her sigh “This is just not my world any more.” She felt alienated. She felt ALIEN. Is there anybody
in this room who hasn’t heard a colleague express that alienation?
Even worse, XML didn’t make publishers’ lives easier -- it made them harder! Editing, typesetting, indexing, all
these workflows got hugely more complicated for what looked at the time like super-dubious returns. And the
XML community took no notice whatever of their difficulties, the difficulties ACTUAL PEOPLE were having doing
ACTUAL WORK with XML. Why? Because the XML community was having way too much fun loudly proclaiming
XML’s superiority over everything ever, and going off into corners to have arcane technical arguments about XML
namespaces. Not very soylent! Not humane! Not made of people!
Now, publishers did still make some XML, I grant you. I saw a lot of it. Forgive my language, but trade publisher
XML was CRAP. It was garbage. You wouldn’t feed it to your pet Cylon, it was so bad. Which goes to show that
technology that doesn’t fit into real people’s environments won’t be used properly, if it’s used at all.