ONLINE CLASSIFIEDS: SAU-2?

    by Mark Toner,Presstime Staff Writer

    Compared with online competitors threatening to grab huge chunks of classified revenue, the pressures prompting adoption of the Standard Advertising Unit--the industry's last major standard--were bush league. Today, publishers face "extreme pressures that didn't exist in the SAU era," Melinda Gipson, NAA director of new-media business development, told Connections'98 attendees.

    SGML, HTML, XML: A Metalanguage Primer

    A metalanguage is just a language--except it allows users to create new families of languages. All involve tagging documents for style, for content or both. For instance, the [I] tag in HyperText Markup Language tells browsing software "display the following text as italic."

    The patriarch is Standard Generalized Markup Language, first used for technical documentation. At SGML's heart is the Document Type Definition, allowing users to create custom tags. In fact, World Wide Web lingua franca HTML is nothing more than an SGML DTD for online presentation.

    NAA's Classified Standards Task Force decided that HTML was too limited for its proposed standard but remained leery of SGML's complexity. Enter Extensible Markup Language. A scaled-down SGML variant, XML still allows users to create DTDs controlling content and presentation. For instance, a newspaper DTD could include a [byline] tag meaning "process the following text as a searchable identified field. Also, display it online as bold text and in print as 9 point boldface Helvetica."

    Both Microsoft and Netscape already include limited XML support in existing browsers, and Microsoft envisions bringing XML to the desktop in future versions of its Office applications.

    With other players large and small aggregating classified ads nationwide, newspaper publishers must follow suit, and an NAA task force now turns to developing a classified-interchange standard. "The value of online classifieds will depend on the depth of the data and the power of the database," said NAA President and Chief Executive Officer John F. Sturm. The task force also seeks to give publishers, rather than outside technology-providers, control over how classifieds are exchanged. "If we don't do this, someone else will," Gipson warned.

    Chaired by Jack Stanley, vice president of operations for the Houston Chronicle, the 40-member NAA Classified Standards Task Force gathered in May and again during NEXPO®'98; an August meeting also is slated.

    The group, composed of classified, operations and new-media personnel as well as traditional and online vendors, is focusing initially on critical real-estate, employment and automotive categories. "An exchange format, not an end-user format," is the goal, said John Iobst, NAA director of advanced computer science. Content-neutral, it would allow transfers for print as well as online purposes. By comparison, the decade-old CREST classified-entry format can't be adapted to online use.

    Each classified ad would be broken into components, including header information, billing and business information, and text sifted into data elements for searching.

    The task force has opted to build the standard using Extensible Markup Language, or XML, an evolving metalanguage similar to the familiar HyperText Markup Language allowing users to create commands defining content and format (see sidebar, below).

    NAA's effort follows independent efforts by two newspaper companies. Last spring, Robert S. Cauthorn, director of technology for The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, developed a preliminary classified-interchange format dubbed the Pulitzer protocol and available to NAA-member newspapers. Knight Ridder New Media also developed its own metalanguage format for exchanging classifieds; its Real Cities network now swaps 21 classified file transfers per day via modem.

    The Association task force plans to develop a review draft of the format by October, according to Iobst.

    Related online classified-standard links:

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