Dana VanDen Heuvel: Seybold II

September 10, 2003

Seybold II - Session Recaps

The Seybold SF2003 conference rolls on until Friday, but I'm out of here today. Having made it through my 2 sessions, and having listened to a few others, I'm convinced that this is one of the most influential conferences in the pubishing and new media space today. I was inspired and humbled by the cadre of experts here, this truly is the conference of the best and the brightest. Chief Scientists, Worldwide Evangelists, CEOs, Senior Analysts...they were all here.

Here's a wrapup on some of the sessions attended and their substance.

1. The Future of Publishing Technology
Publishing-centric technologies--PDF, print-on-demand, and content management--are spreading throughout the enterprise. The experts in this panel ran the spectrum from a PhD talking about how animals process data and the evolution of publishing systems, to a more pragmatic presentation by Mills Davis, Managing Director, Project10X, on some of the overarching shifts in how content is delivered to users. There is a dramatic shift going on in the speed of content delivery, shepherded along by those who are in the network publishing and semantic networks camp.

2. Speaking in Tongues: A Modern Guide to Understanding Today's Web Languages
This was really an eye opener for me. I'm stuck in the old HTML paradigm, while everone else is moving to the CSS/XHTML/XML paradigm. Seriously, I'm not that bad. The common thread through several of the conference presentations was the seperation of form and presentation elements of web pages, documents, PDFs, and other publishing media. By using the CSS paradigm for marking up pages, one lightens the weight of the page by 1/2 and speeds download time, thus improving the user experience. Everytime you add a presentation element to a page you increase it's weight, increase the chance of error, and make additional work when doing future improvements. Peder Engrob mentioned this in our cross eyed and painless session as well when he demoed the synergry between Adobe InDesign, GoLive, Illustator, and ImageReady. Neat stuff. The take away is that I'll be seeking to understand more about using CSS more religously in our company.