What is ZENPRESS?
Technically, ZENPRESS is the bridge between the logical content structure of a publication and the physical HTML structure of an Internet Web site. It's an automatic publication generator and editorial production system. We call it the Internet Printing Press.
"ZENPRESS is the bridge between the logical content structure of a publication and the physical HTML structure of an Internet Web site."
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A typical issue of a Web magazine might have over 250 individual Web pages, including all the links, back issues, paginated pages and so forth. A year of such a magazine means managing about 3,000 such Web pages. If you figure that each issue requires about 50,000 lines of HTML conservatively, and then figure that you're doing 12 issues a year, you're talking about 600,000 lines of HTML.
If you multiply that across publications (at the time of writing, we have three publications) you're talking about something on the order of 1.8 million lines of HTML that have to be generated each year. That's what ZENPRESS does. For each issue, ZENPRESS will generate that issue's HTML (about 50,000 to 80,000 lines) on an Athlon XP 1,500Mhz processor in about a minute. Obviously if you're going to have people doing that work, it would take months for individuals to hand-code all that arcana. Even if you tried to do this with the help of an HTML layout tool like Front Page, dropping the content in and working it like you would with a page layout program, you'd still have days of work and you'd have to hand-build all the cross-indexes, links and so forth.
In computer science terms, ZENPRESS is a filter of immense complexity. Filters typically take in one or more files at one end, do some kind of processing on the data, and crank out one or more files at the other end. ZENPRESS does exactly that. ZENPRESS takes in a large number of plain text files, processes them internally, and produces HTML files on the other end suitable for using on the Internet. The files we feed to ZENPRESS are plain text files that contain our article content and some structural information about the publication. At the other end, what comes out of ZENPRESS are all of the HTML files that comprise the online publication and Web site. ZENPRESS is that black box in the middle that does all the crunching and processing on those files.
An important element of this process is separating editorial decisions from design decisions. When editors operate ZENPRESS, they don't need to (and really shouldn't) make graphic design or style decisions. ZENPRESS preserves common formats so our editors don't need to be graphics designers or artists. This is quite important, because we want to see consistency across the journal, issue-to-issue. By separating out the graphic design elements of the process from editorial decisions, editors are prevented from taking artistic license in the issue's design.
For example, we want an editor to make a decision about whether or not an article is to be considered a feature, but not make a decision that he wants to use 78 point type in a header, or that this week, she really likes chartreuse for sidebars. It’s also a win because, by removing that capability, we also remove the responsibility for graphics appearance and consistency from the already overburdened shoulders of the typical editor.
The simplicity of plain text files
At this point in development, ZENPRESS does not have much of a graphical user interface (although ZENPRESS 3.0, due Spring 2003, will have an amazing Web-based interface).
ZENPRESS is controlled by a few menu commands that initiate the loading of the files. The bulk of the processing is controlled by commands within each file. The files themselves are very simple. They consist of the articles for a given issue of the publication and some commands that describe how the files are to be formatted.
It's also very easy for someone to write a plain text file containing these commands in literally any tool, in any environment, on any machine without concern over the destination computer. This became important because we didn’t know whether or not we were going to be writing this stuff on Macs or PCs, whether authors were going to be doing things on different kinds computers, or what writing tool was going to be available at any given time.
This proved prescient later in the operation of ZENPRESS. We found that in addition to articles submitted from PCs and Macs, we'd get articles submitted from Linux machines, and I'd often write my articles on my Handspring or Jornada.
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