MARS, what is happening?

My impression is that not much is happening around MARS for the people who deal in thought leadership otherwise described as blogging. I see blogging as a chance to try things out. I also write as a citizen journalist and the editors at OhmyNews do ask questions, check sources etc. So the speculation in this post is there partly to encourage some feedback.

So this is based on a bit of web searching ahead of Graph Expo, starting with What They Think. It struck me that Cary Sherburne mentions XPSland as well as the topics suggested by Ralph Nappi. Clearly this is going to get some attention.

Looking on the Adobe site, there is a session with Julie Shaffer including the question "Has Microsoft XPS taken some steam from PDF?". But no mention of MARS as advertised.

Looking at the Adobe blogs confirms the guess that not much is happening. Bill McCoy last wrote about MARS in January, Nabeel Al-Shamma and Shebanation in December 06, PDF Developer in November.

Search engines being unreliable as they are, the most recent post is from John Nack who links to a NASA photo of a sunset on Mars as featured on Wikipedia. That is about it since January.

My guess is that MARS is much further forward than is generally supposed. There must have been some thought about XML and PDF some time ago.

I do find Adobe a bit strange in the apparent emphasis on a Flash future. Apparently this is a defence against Microsoft. Meanwhile XPSland seems a lot closer to where communication happens at the moment. I can see the print industry connecting with XML.

I would welcome any information about MARS and future intentions on flat documents.

Maybe Microsoft at Graph Expo will provoke something. Can Adobe assume that the world of Postscript and PDF is just a secure base and not that interesting?

Look out! They are behind you!

Previously

How paranoid is Adobe?

From OhmyNews

Mars opens PDF to XML connections


Open Source Graphics Meets Quality Assurance

Good news on e-books

Possibly Gee Ranasinha will rethink his fair and balanced views on e-books. As mentioned June 19th his view can be summarised as "e-books are rubbish". Maybe this is because he writes for Image Reports, a print magazine that is only beginning to launch a web presence in my own fair and balanced opinion.

The Online World Review Blog reports that Springer have done some research on their own customers and found that e-books are ok.

According to Springer they said the eBook enhanced user access with greater functionality, more categories of information and "provided clear advantages over print publications". Information professionals also told the Attfield Dykstra and Partners, who carried out survey that not physically handling the book for archiving had cost advantages.

Maybe this is not surprising. The question was only asked of existing customers for e-books.

However this blog will include more links to the sort of publication associated with Online Information, an event in December. It may just add to the confusion but I find that the scope of blogs can be too limiting. Maybe I just need one blog and more tags. Now I really am going off topic unless drupa 2008 turns out to be a show about tagging.

Newspaper discussion moved to IPEX blog

Distinctions of time and space are breaking down again. This drupa blog is meant to be about 2008 although the shape of this is already fairly clear.

Recent UK news is that Newstech has been cancelled for 2009. This is about newspaper technology. My guess is that many people have decided that presses for paper are not exactly the technology for news organisations in future. So what technology would be interesting? Continues on the IPEX 2002 blog.

Was this an issue in 2002? Possibly. Maybe the web was obvious even earlier.