Michelle,
Here's a crack @your question-- I know a little about this space, having worked in large scale publishing software. I don't know much about interleaf except that they had a huge system, Worldview that was losing market share 3/4 years ago. Very old information though.
XML- good useful tech, good for processes exchanging information. Structured for computers to read. Not optimized for file size. Behind the scenes stuff. IT people like it. Can be combined with style instructions (XSL) for display. Oracle is working on lots of XML/web enabled stuff.
PDF - Platform-independent, small file size. Basically display postscript - goal=preserve appearance, fonts, render well on screen/printer. Can be created from any app on any platform by printing to their print driver. This is key because users can use their existing applications to create data. It's hard to get information "out of" PDF, or alter it - a virtue when publishing.
It's amazing to me that MSFT hasn't taken a crack at PDF :)
Adobe owns the PDF standard, and succeeded in establishing it as a standard.. they invested 80 million VC money to help do this --http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/adobeventures/ . 3 years ago no one had heard of PDF - today just about everyone seems to have the Reader.
You're a technologist, I am too - but in the real world no one wants to switch authoring tools. Most will continue to use Word. And that's what Joe academician or corporate guy will have. Authors really want their work to look "just right"-- down to line breaks, hyphenation, fonts, page layout. PDF makes it really really easy to preserve appearance and exchange final documents.
ok off the soapbox :) |
