The power of Smart Style Objects
Let’s relate some of these things together. Internally, when a dot command is interpreted, ZENPRESS scans a variety of database tables to find the Smart Style Object (which is really an executable code segment stored in a named module) and then loads and runs the code.
It’s this loading and running of a small code segment, rather than just applying formatting, that fundamentally distinguishes a Smart Style Object from a traditional “style” element. Another distinguishing factor is that Smart Style Objects are stored in a database and are retrievable via database rules. Further, because of the hierarchical nature of the database itself, the Smart Style Objects have traditional object-oriented attributes, including (most importantly) inheritance. The Free, Online Dictionary of Computing defines “inheritance” as:
In object-oriented programming, inheritance is the ability to derive new classes from existing classes. A derived class (subclass) inherits the instance variables and methods of the base class (superclass), and may add new instance variables and methods. New methods may be defined with the same names as those in the base class, in which case they override the original one.
This is exactly how Smart Style Objects work in ZENPRESS. We might define a standard .TITLE usable across all publications. Then, we might design a slightly different .TITLE for use in DominoPower, as a default dot command. But we might also have a .TITLE usable for downloading to handheld devices and a different .TITLE that’s used when displaying Web pages online. Although the original article contains only one .TITLE reference, the inheritance hierarchy defined and active at the time will determine how the article is processed and ultimately rendered for use on the Internet.
It's very simple (at a programming level) to build these dot commands because, once they’re constructed, they’re stored in a variety of database tables. Based on the currently active dot set (and I'll discuss this more in a moment), ZENPRESS looks up and executes the code that corresponds to that object. Because dot commands are represented by code modules, when executed, they can perform actions. So, for example, if you have a dot command for an author bio, when it's encountered it'll check to make sure that the author's name has already been provided. Likewise if there's an author's name, the Smart Style Object will check to make sure that there's a bio that's been provided. This is why, while these are Style Objects that are at first glance similar to style sheet attributes, they're much smarter.
There’s a bit more to it, but you’ll need to know how a typical journal is structured first.
Home Page and Table of Contents Page organization
A typical ZENPRESS publication is structured into a number of main pages and a number of article pages. The Home Page consists of a section that has news headlines, and a spotlight article. Also on that page, is a list of the other articles. Further down on the Home Page is the back issue article of the day, links to back issues, links to PowerBoards, links to tips, and a variety of ads. The Home Page is updated daily, the news items change every day, and the spotlight article and the other article titles change once a month when the issue changes. You can see an example of how such a page is structured in Figure D.
Figure D. In this graphic, you can see three of the automatically generated areas on the top half of a typical Home Page generated by ZENPRESS.
A careful look at Figure D will also show you something interesting. The screenshot shown is different from what the magazine currently looks like. This, too, showcases the power of ZENPRESS. We are able to easily update the look of the publication while retaining the key editorial elements.
A look at the .SPOTLIGHT and .FEATURE Smart Style Objects
The spotlight article is the main article we focus on in a given issue. That article is represented on the Home Page with more than just its title. We also include a picture, a flying header (basically a subhead that appears above the title), the title itself in a much larger font, and a short summary of the article.
When you click on any of the magazine entries on the Home Page, you’re taken to a Table of Contents page. This page has a list of all of the article titles and a short summary that describes each of the articles. Clicking on any of the titles will take you to the article itself.
What's interesting about the Table of Contents page is that it's broken into three or four logical sections, shown in Figure E. At the top are features. These are the articles we want to focus on. They're what we consider the main articles for the issue. Then there is a middle section that contains articles of a lesser importance. The third section is Departments. Articles in this section are the regular columns that you typically see in a magazine. And, occasionally, we have a Sponsors section, which are articles that sponsors pay to run in a publication.
Figure E. In this 16% reduced view, you can see a portion of the Table of Contents page. Articles are placed into different areas of the page based on whether they’re a Feature, a Department, or a general article.
Here, too, our current look has been easily changed from what it looked like back when this snapshot was taken.
Let’s get back to the Smart Style Objects. One other reason they’re smart is because they control the where articles are placed in a journal. For example, we use the .FEATURE Smart Style Object in our journal production process. If we decide that one of the articles merits being a feature article, in other words, being placed in the top portion of the Table of Contents, all we need to do is go into the article's text file and type ".FEATURE".
What will then happen is that, in the process of building the journal, that article will be built as normal. The article title and summary for that particular will be placed in the Features section of the Table of Contents and, in the listing of articles on the Home Page, it will appear at the beginning of the listing as opposed to at the end.
Now, if we add to that particular article’s text file a “.SPOTLIGHT”, what we're saying is that this is the article we're going to spotlight in the publication. At this point, this article may also be a feature, but it will be the one that is broken out on the Home Page with a special graphic, flying head, fancy title, and detailed summary.
All this is accomplished by simply having the editor write ".SPOTLIGHT" in the text file of the article itself. As you can see, Smart Style Objects like .FEATURE and.SPOTLIGHT handle much more than just basic formatting you’d get from a traditional style sheet -- they actually handle how the entire article is assembled and goes together in the publication, its positioning in the publication and its priority or level of presence in the publication.
Managing Figures
Figures are also controlled by Smart Style Object technology. When we have a big figure, for example something that might take an entire screen, we don't want to show that as part of the inline flow of an article because it would take up too much space and it would take too long to download.
So our editors create a thumbnail (or a smaller picture) of that larger image -- usually the thumbnail is about two square inches. The full-size picture might be about 10 inches square. Whenever the dot command .FIGPAIR is used, ZENPRESS automatically generates the smaller image inline in the article along with a link to an expanded larger image that's displayed by the browser when someone clicks on the smaller image in an article.
Because of ZENPRESS, our editor doesn't really need to write all of that code and build all those separate pages. If that were the case, he or she would actually have to build separate HTML pages for each of those elements, one-by-one. With ZENPRESS, all the editor does is say "Oops, this is a big picture, let me use a FIGPAIR." That tells ZENPRESS that there will be two images used (hence FIGPAIR, for a pair of figures) and that the appropriate links and files will need to be created.
The management of scalable content
Smart Style Objects are also used in another way. They create what is commonly called scalable content. The idea behind scalable content is the ability to publish the same content in different forms – for different browsers, for different audiences, for different devices, and so forth. Today, we can generate the following different formats from one set of original content files:
- paginated articles, represented as traditional Web pages;
- a specially formatted article that’s suitable for printing. We call this an EasyPrint article;
- a Table of Contents and Home Page that are updated with article information;
- a handheld version of the entire publication;
- an XML version of the headlines for use in My Netscape;
- an HTML stub version of the headlines for use on frame-based Web sites;
- and a standard simple text file version of the headlines that are also useable by other Web sites.
ZENPRESS generates all of these in one process, in one shot. Amazingly, it also does it in less than a minute.
Smart Style Objects are ideal for multi-use content. For example, an editor would create one text file containing an article and that content can be dynamically re-purposed for a variety of different output formats. More often, the editor would create and organize a series of text files representing the articles in an issue, and those files could be run through ZENPRESS and the result would be outputs of differing formats.
Here’s what that looks like to our readers. We can take an article, which has figures and tables and illustrations. We write and edit that once. It gets brought in to ZENPRESS through the import phase. ZENPRESS then creates one version of the article that's paginated. That makes it easier to read and bookmark. In this version, each HTML page generated also has previous and next buttons that will tell the reader’s browser to load the HTML files that correspond to the next and previous pages in the article.
ZENPRESS will also create an EasyPrint version of the publication. In this case, what it will do is, rather than having links, for example, in advertisements, it will have the full URL because it's assuming you're printing it out. Rather than colorizing various typographic objects like the flying head, all type will be black and white. Rather than having clickable figure items, all figures will be formatted best for printing. And the whole piece will be ready for printout.
Generating mobile content
ZENPRESS also has the ability to generate handheld content. Like we use Web browsers on the desktop, we're now using a variety of Web browsing technology on handheld devices. This is not our technology, but, like desktop browsers, these handheld browsers are available to anyone on the Internet for free. One such product is called ProxiWeb. It's a Web browser for your PalmPilot. It literally lets you browse a Web page on your PalmPilot, as long as you’re connected to the Internet. Another is called AvantGo. This allows you to download a series of Web pages to your PalmPilot for offline browsing. You can do the same thing on Pocket PC devices and other handhelds as well.
Here’s where it gets interesting. A Web page built for a desktop browser that might support 800 dots by 600 dots that can each be one of 16.7 million colors is obviously going to need to look substantially different on a handheld device that's 160 dots by 160 dots (and black and white). Equally, while you might have a 20 gigabyte hard drive on your desktop, you might only have a total of 1 megabyte of memory in your handheld. As a result, we needed to create Web pages for handheld systems that look and feel substantially different than those that would be viewed on a desktop computer.
In particular, we had to reduce images to black and white or eliminate them entirely. Eliminate the use of color. Perhaps use shorter text. And, if readers are using something like AvantGo where they’re mobile and not connected to a network, we needed to make hypertext links respond in a different way. Since readers aren’t wired to the Web anymore, we needed to restructure our links so that when a reader clicks on something, it takes him or her to an internal piece of information instead of trying to look something up on the Web.
Because of the way Smart Style Objects work, when we import an issue into ZENPRESS, ZENPRESS also creates a handheld or mobile version of the whole publication suitable for downloading to a Palm device, reformatting and changing the way the content is structured for that environment. For example, rather than downloading images used in figures, ZENPRESS generates a line that says the figure is available on the Web site, like that shown in Figure F (don’t get confused -– Figure F shows a picture of a Figure A).
Figure F. The handheld version generates a figure element without the actual graphic, saving space on the device and download time.
Generating channels (content used on other sites)
ZENPRESS also generates stub files or what are called “Channels”. These are chunks of information that are usable on other Web sites. For example, when you go to MyNetscape.com, you're able to subscribe to a variety of channels which contain headlines from various online Web sites. In our case, if you subscribe to MyNetscape, you can get the news channel or the how-to channel for any of our publications, as shown in Figure G.
Figure G. Headlines and article titles are shown on the My Netscape network home page. These are called Channels and any reader who uses My Netscape as a home page can read these headlines and click to visit our publications.
Internet users who use My Netscape as their home page, are able to get a list of what the latest headlines are from, say, PalmPower and a list of what the latest articles are.
In order to do this, special channel files have to be created and generated to the Web server in a format that Netscape has specified and their servers can interpret. ZENPRESS automatically does this as well.
Dot sets: hierarchical object-oriented inheritance for scalable and multi-use content
The way that the Smart Style Object technology does this re-purposing of content so easily is through the use of what we call “dot sets”. For example, a typical publication might have 50 or 60 Smart Style Objects, everything from a .H1 which is a first level heading and a .H2 which is a slightly smaller heading to a .BEGIN_SIDEBAR/.END_SIDEBAR sequence which generates a box around some information, to the previously mentioned .TITLE, .AUTHOR, .FEATURE, .SPOTLIGHT objects we’ve already discussed.
Taken together, a group of Smart Style Objects become a dot set, and they represent how the publication will look. There's a ZENPRESS option inside each publication that says which dot set is used at any given time – and this choice can modified at any time. For certain pages of the publication, one dot set might be used. For other pages in a publication, a different dot set might be used.
So as long as we change the name of the dot set, the publication's entire look and feel will change and use a new set of rules. Since dot sets contain a whole bunch of Smart Style Objects, which are all smart, that new set of rules also includes a whole new set of intelligence. At the surface level, we can use this to, for example, create holiday versions of our publication, where all of the dot sets reformat the publication in pretty Christmas colors, Halloween colors, or Fourth of July colors.
We can use dot sets to create a breaking-news version of the publication. By switching the current dot set to the Breaking News set, ZENPRESS can reformat the Home Page so that it focuses on an important piece of key news that's happening at the moment.
We also use the dot sets to structure the handheld content (which has to be very different in its appearance and structure from the online version).
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