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RE: Adobe Discovers Information Can Change

• To: 'Antoine Quint' <antoine@g...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Adobe Discovers Information Can Change
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 17:15:06 -0500

Ummm.... I use them too.  Their products are cool.
Their implementation of SVG is unmatched so far. 
Their patents are secure too. ;-)
 
The quotes in the article blithely ignore history 
or reveal a lack of knowledge of it.  Either is 
unacceptable from a CEO or product manager at this 
stage of the game.  I do feel that companies such 
as Adobe that spent a lot of effort trying to quash 
markup before it rolled over them need to acknowledge 
that they were not exactly first to the party or 
wisest rather than say "AHHH!!! XML!  I GET IT NOW!" 
They knew.  They just played the game MS was so 
roundly criticized for playing.

Yet MS got there first and has done more for XML than 
almost any of what I consider to be 'the late comers 
to markup'.   ArborText has been around a long time 
in markup and fielded some of the most sophisticated 
markup systems available.  Those bits leave me gasping 
because they certainly do know the history or did.

Unless the XML company CEOs get this stuff right, why
should anyone believe the rest of their story?  It 
only hurts our markets when that stuff comes out because 
we have a customer-base burned badly by the hype, 
investors who lost billions, and now we have to be 
extra special on point to sort facts for them.  The 
most honest history of XML I've seen on a company 
site was at Microsoft.  They do learn quickly.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Antoine Quint [mailto:antoine@g...]

Hey there,

It's my first post out here as I recently joined this list. I think your
points Len are a little harsh towards Adobe (I don't know enough about
ArborText though).

Adobe, in their own way (that is at the deep core graphics, and then
network publishing) have embraced XML fairly early in its existence,
providing a world-class and free SVG implementation since the earliest
days of the SVG Working Drafts (the Adobe SVG Viewer). They have since
done an extensive work publicizing SVG, included SVG support in many
products (Illustrator, AlterCast, InDesign and FrameMaker), introduced
an XML-based metadata platform called XMP and pushed custom XML grammars
for interoperability between Adobe applications.

As a regular user of Adobe products I am really satisfied by how they
have been using XML in their products, and very intelligently too; and
by that I do not mean the "hype factor" - contrary to rival Macromedia -
but for the sheer benefit of useability.

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