No Source Is an Island
By Dale Dougherty
Web publishing is a vanilla Web application, one of those basic flavors of Web development that might not get anyone too excited. There are, however, new developments that may turn your attention to Web publishing. I recently organized a Developers' Day track titled "Publishing Tools and Techniques" at WWW9 in Amsterdam. Given that publishing was in the title, and the fact that there were five other tracks available for the 500-plus developers, I wasn't expecting much interest. So I was really surprised to see that our room was packed, even overflowing at times.
I wasn't quite sure why until the end of the day. Certainly, we had good speakers and talks that covered content management systems of the Open Source variety as well as database publishing systems from Microsoft. One speaker's hand-drawn diagrams (scanned and then posted to the Web) were laughably crude but loveable, especially because his publishing system was already implementing XLink and XPointer in very innovative ways. Our last speaker was David Galbreath, who is the technical lead for Moreover.com, a site that provides a search engine for news that it aggregates from over 1000 sources. He mentioned that the developers of Web publishing systems and services were among the early adopters of distributed computing techniques on the Web. Dave Winer of Userland, who had talked about his Manila publishing system in this track and organized a track on "Distributed Computing," agreed. Winer has had a hand in the development of two important distributed computing specifications, XML-RPC and SOAP, both of which are lightweight message-passing protocols that allow Web applications running on different servers to communicate with each other.
