Quark's ambitious play to acquire Adobe Systems captured Wall Street's attention Tuesday. But the desktop publishing giant is quietly making inroads into what may be a far more strategic realm.
Earlier this month, Quark joined the World Wide Web Consortium, and last week, company representatives attended their first meeting of the consortium working group. The Colorado-based company has begun to help shape extensible markup language (XML), the standard that could dictate the future of text and graphics layout on the Web.
"The Web is at a transition stage, and XML is an important next step to what's possible," said Mark Lemmons, the business unit manager for QuarkImmedia, a multimedia design tool. "The Web's not about layout, but XML represents the next step toward a better world where structure of data is separate from its representation."
Over the last decade, Quark and Adobe have taken the print publishing world by storm, developing tools that even small shops can use to design and publish their own magazines, newspapers, and other documents. But neither company has effectively translated its tools for the Web in a way that would make publishing in an electronic medium as easy as it now is on paper.
"Adobe and Quark have a large print-based customer base and are trying to introduce Web tools to them, but not giving them what they need," said Joan-Carol Brigham, a research analyst with the International Data Corporation.
"There's a lot of legacy data that could be put online, and that extra layer of information that XML gives is great for getting those reams of print-based information online," Brigham said.
Even for experienced Web developers, getting a document to look the same in a Microsoft or Netscape Web browser can be a tedious task.
That situation may change as the World Wide Web Consortium adopts changing graphics and layout standards. Publishers hope to be able to present data in different media with less hassle and as much control as designers currently have on paper.
"Different media call for different solutions, and it's about being able to separate the data from the presentation," said Cameron Pope, a Quark engineer who attended the XML meeting last weekend.
Adobe, Quark's primary competitor in the desktop publishing market, has been involved with the consortium for several years, and has proposed standards such as Precision Graphics Markup Language.
PGML aims to use XML to represent vector graphics on the Web. Often enough, companies deeply involved in the standards-setting process are at an advantage in that, once the standard is set, they can quickly get their products out the door.
Lemmons sees plenty of opportunity to have a say in consortium standards that would affect Quark's business.
"For all the [consortium] participation, those problems [with graphics layout on the Web] remain unsolved. It's like having a head start in the wilderness," Lemmons said, referring to Adobe's involvement thus far in the consortium. "There are advantages in terms of taking a different perspective and having seen the Web unfold. And we think now is the optimal time to put our hand in."
Pope pointed out that Quark's desktop publishing software, QuarkXPress, can output documents as HTML, but it's still impossible to format a document to make it accessible to the entire potential audience on the Web.
As standards like XML are added to the Web's infrastructure, presentation could become more flexible, since XML allows the data in a document to be separated from layout information that defines its appearance.
For example, text embedded in graphics would be accessible by search engines in XML. The extensible style language (XSL) is one of the first attempts to accomplish that. The consortium released the first version of that standard last week.
"It's important to join W3C now because of what XSL and XML will be 18 months from now," Lemmons said.
Quark is primarily interested in the XML, XSL, vector graphics, and Document Object Model working groups, and Lemmons said that product announcements scheduled for later this year will support XML.
Tim Bray, founder of the W3C's XML working group, said that developing Web-wise design tools is going to be a major challenge for both Quark and Adobe.
"The next generation of design tools is going to have to figure out a way to allow simultaneous authoring of content and style sheets, with the full knowledge that electronic presentation is fluid and not controllable, and somehow empower them to achieve good results in terms of color and whitespace and typography," said Bray.
"I haven't seen such a tool yet."
