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	Browsing the Associated Press: The newsgathering cooperative offers subscribers Internet access to its photo archives and recent images for downloading over the World-Wide Web and publication in print.

Web browsers now peering into much more than the 'Net

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Internet-based standards are making their move into the newspaper, not just as network protocols but as the interface of the future, for everything ranging from editorial and advertising systems to RIP interfaces and newsprint tracking tools.

Some of the systems, such as the RIP interfaces from ECRM, Autologic Information International and Prepress Solutions, are available now, but most are in development.

"We wanted to see if this was useful," said Ray Toothaker, CEO of Advanced Technical Solutions Inc. of North Andover, Mass., giving a demo of his concept system. "It gives the same user interface as our other products, just through a web browser."

The use of a web browser instead of a client application to get into legacy systems is an attractive option for many, especially in the newsroom. Given the demands already placed on newspaper systems departments trying to produce new sections, tailor existing products and move content onto the Internet, as well as deal with Y2K issues, a web browser is a welcome step toward standardizing applications, reducing training and cutting installation costs.

James Farrington, director of news operations at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., cited other reasons he was pleased to see the web interface for the editorial system from Harris Publishing Systems Inc. of Melbourne, Fla.

"It means that without major expenditures, we can have our 100-plus laptop users in the field hook into our editorial system," Farrington said. "Editors at home will be able to make late changes or review copy."

The Star-Ledger has tried other things in the past to allow outside access, Farrington said, but they were either too slow, opened security holes, or both. He said the web interface would allow ready access without loading yet another application on a remote computer.

The yet-to-be-named Harris system comes in two flavors, a Java implementation with applets downloaded to the browser or server-side implementation. The two products offer the look and feel, as well as the functionality, of the existing Harris XP-21 system.

The Millennium classified system from CKP Newspaper Systems also uses the Java applet and a standard browser. Like most advertising systems, it offers the standard features of scheduling, pricing, upselling and the other tools people expect in such a system. The system uses the browser and Java applets as thin clients, hooking to a Sybase database running on UNIX for the heavy lifting. Most notable is that the system comes only with a web interface.

The Millennium editorial web interface got its tryout during the 1998 Winter Olympics, with reporters from the Houston Chronicle in Nagano, Japan, hooking in to the Chronicle through the Web.

Patrick Stewart, general manager for Bedford, N.H.-based CKP, said there was no one reason for the switch to the browser interface.

"It makes the users part of the broader corporate intranet and it gives you the ability to have same interface in the field as well as inside the corporation," he said. "Also, the world is moving in that direction, so availability of tools and programmers is better, plus it promises platform agility."

A cup of Java
SAXotech, a Danish supplier of editorial and archiving systems, also has a web interface based on Java.

Jacob Lauritzen, the company's aptly titled innovation manager, said the goal is to have the same interface and functionality as the standard client. The application is written in Java and runs on an Oracle database on a Windows NT web server.

SAXotech's product goes the same route as CKP's Millennium to get around the browser limitation of one window per browser, using tabs on the various applets.

In the standard Windows MDI, or multiple document interface, several documents can be open within a single window, making it easy to switch among them while conserving screen space and resources. Browsers, on the other hand, can support only a single window; to see multiple documents at once, multiple instances of the browser must be opened. Some developers get around this by creating tabs on their pages, allowing a user to move from applet to applet within a single browser window by clicking on the appropriate tab.

Page layout on the SAXotech system remains in Quark XPress because, Lauritzen said, it made little sense to move XPress into a browser. "We're not going to put page layout into the browser," he said, "but writing and photos work fine."

The Associated Press has made large chunks of its products available through the Web, allowing any AP member with a browser -- and the right codes -- access to the newsgathering cooperative.

"We want to duplicate on the Internet what we do on satellite," said AP's Jill Arabas. "The satellite delivery is still our primary method, but the Internet is coming up."

AP makes its text and photo desks rerun content on the 'Net, with the last two weeks' worth of PhotoStream images on-line. Also available are AP graphics, the ad delivery service AP AdSEND, U.S. Supreme Court decisions (in PDF format), daily stocks, paginated stocks pages and a wealth of other market-related information.

Like SAXotech and many other suppliers, DeskNet Inc. is using a mix of web and client interfaces. The company has an advantage over some manufacturers in that its newsroom engine is the Lotus Notes-based NewsEngin. Web tools are tightly integrated into Notes, a groupware product from IBM, making them readily available to NewsEngin and its related applications.

"We think Notes is a better user interface," said Alan Johnson, product manager of New York-based DeskNet, which provides links to XPress for pagination with NewsEngin, "but there are places where the Web makes more sense. Stringers, the general public and even some remote bureaus probably would be better off with the Web."

AD-Star Publishing Technologies has moved its ad delivery service onto the net with its AD-Starnet client, a web browser interface into the company's Windows NT-SQL server. "We want to provide a generic interface," said AD-Star President Leslie Bernhard, echoing other suppliers. "We wanted to keep it simple."

AD-Star, which is based in Marina del Rey, Calif., says its systems run in conjunction with a newspaper's existing advertising system, allowing ads to come in from an agency or a private party. Markup codes specific to a paper can be entered, and links to a paper's billing system are available, allowing pricing, scheduling and formatting to be handled through the web interface.

FutureTense Inc. of Acton, Mass., like many other suppliers of classified products, also has embraced the Web, with AdOnTime enabling advertisers to order, enter and manage classified ads from their browser. Ads can go to print or be published on a web site, a feature common to these systems.

Cascade Systems Inc. of Andover, Mass., also has embraced the web browser, using it as a way to extend its Dataflow tracking environment to a paper's advertising customers or to its intranet.

Cascade's W3 is a scripting layer the company uses to build applications on top of its existing products. With the W3 client, products are cross-platform, allowing information for things such as the ad-tracking system to be made available across the Web, and allowing papers to send a PDF back to an advertiser to proof.

Print production on the Web
One of the hottest areas for web interfaces is in the pre-press production area, with Prepress Solutions, Autologic Information International Inc. (AII) and ECRM all displaying RIPs (raster image processors) that could be monitored and controlled through an intranet.

David McGahey, manager of market development for Prepress Solutions of East Hanover, N.J., said the web interface allowed managers to more readily monitor the status of a RIP, both during the daily production process and for reporting and verification.

"Each RIP has a URL. If you go to that URL with your browser, you can see the main status, job accounting and even a low-res page preview," McGahey said.

It's not just monitoring, though, McGahey said. Whether a person was at the RIP using the standard control panel or looking at it remotely through an intranet, he or she could do everything from cutting media to generating reports that could be moved into a spreadsheet and analyzed.

Bill Cotton, a customer service engineer with ECRM of Tewksbury, Mass., said he thought the web interface was the way to go. "Our web interface is the only control panel," Cotton said. Setting up an ECRM Rip is handled through the browser, whether at the machine or remotely. "Customers have been slow accepting it," he said, "but I think it's the future."

Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based AII also showed a web-based RIP, allowing users to control and monitor the unit remotely. Like the other suppliers, Product Manager Merlin Owens said control is important in shops with satellite production facilities, or where RIPs are just spread across the floor.

But the Web is not just for pre-press. Denex Inc. of Sewickley, Pa., makers of a totalizing system to help track newsprint and newsprint waste, has a web version of one of its products. "We use Microsoft's SQL database," said Denex President Gary Carroll, "and just SQL's built-in web wizards to publish to the Web."

Any manager can check on newsprint usage, stocks and related items through a browser, without leaving his desk, without special training and without special applications. Those are part of the three themes suppliers come back to when discussing web browsers: universal availability, less training and reduced costs.

Browsers are standard -- kinda
"You've seen a lot of work on open standards and open interfaces the past few years," said Ken Hurtubise, vice president of marketing for ECRM. "With the amount of investment in web browser technology, you can piggyback rather than invest in user interfaces. Also, many people are web literate, so there is a whole level of activity that you don't have to teach anymore."

"The browser is a uniformly supported standard," said Ken Barth of Tek-Tools of Dallas, whose web-based classified order-entry program is in use in Australia. "Every potential client can get into it from a standard PC."

Another plus for the browser interface is in system management, especially in remote PCs. Most computers come with browsers, so system managers don't have to arrange to install any special software, and conflicts with other programs are almost a thing of the past.

But unlike Clementine, conflicts are not lost and gone forever. The two most common browsers -- Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- handle certain things differently as each company jockeys for position in the marketplace.

To further complicate things, there are differences in the various revisions of each browser, so users with IE 3.01 may see different things than users running IE 4.0. The same thing holds true for people running Netscape's Navigator, and if that is not enough, there are different flavors of Java in use as well as a competing technology from Microsoft, Active X.

Few of the suppliers asked were browser agnostic, with Toothaker of ATS and Giancarlo Vanoni of Swiss supplier Tecnavia epitomizing the problem.

"We're a full Microsoft shop," said Toothaker. "Our browser product uses Active X and runs best on Internet Explorer." Tecnavia, manufacturers of an attractive web-based photo archiving and sales system, goes the other way. "We stick with Netscape," said Vanoni, a systems engineer. "It's just not right with Microsoft."

Active X is a Microsoft technology closely tied to Internet Explorer and the Windows platform. The latest version of Netscape's Navigator is supposed to support it, but there are reports of problems in the technology trade press. Microsoft and Netscape also have slightly different implementation of the Java Virtual Machine, or JVM, that each uses to run Java applets, leading to yet other problems.

Arguments about these differences often take on the appearance of a range war between cattle barons and sheep herders, but it is important to be aware of them, especially if a paper uses other web-based systems such as wire or library systems to produce the paper.

"Promise of all this stuff being browser-independent hasn't materialized yet," said CKP's Stewart. "Typically you have to be on the latest version of the browser, and every new revision, we run through a step of 'make it work again.' "

-- Steven E. Brier

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Last modified: July 24, 2008.

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