When I was named Grand Poohbah of All Things Electronic at the San Francisco Examiner early in the Reagan Administration, my dearly departed mother's reaction was simple: "How can you run the computers at the paper," she asked me, "when you never took computers in college?"
At the time, I scoffed---I was in my 20s and knew everything---and told her I had learned a lot about newspaper computers in the 30 months I had been a professional.
Truth be told, not many of us in the newsrooms of the early '80s knew anything about computers---but we learned. It started out simply enough. We wrote a little typesetting "format." That wasn't really computer programming. It was just making the typesetter do what it was supposed to do. Then we had to do something trickier, like handle the election tables or reformat the stock tables.
The next thing you knew, you were writing "bat" files or macros or HyperTalk scripts or, heaven forbid, C-class libraries.
One of the interesting things about this new-media stuff is that in a lot of cases, newspapers are ignoring their traditional systems editors and giving responsibility for on-line and audiotex to a new group who usually don't have a programming background---even the wimpy kind of programming that system editors do.
So these folks struggled with HTML (that's HyperText Markup Language, the code that makes your World Wide Web browser sit up and bark) with the notion that they'll be OK once they get that under their belt.
Hold the phone: Just as they're getting comfortable with HTML, new data types are headed toward the Web---Acrobat, Macromedia Director and Sun Microsystems' Java. Netscape Communications Corp., the guys who made gadzillions of dollars when their company went public last summer, has decided to embed all three technologies into Netscape Navigator, the most popular browser program.
Cynics of the 'Net point out that it may be months if not years before all these data types are interpreted by Navigator, but those who have achieved a comfort level with HTML are going to find that their next step will be to learn these other programs. Adobe Systems' Acrobat takes a PostScript file and distills it down to its essential typography, creating a file that doesn't need the creating application or fonts to be displayed. On the World Wide Web, the upside is that publishers will have complete type and layout control over what's displayed. The downside is that Acrobat files are still much larger than HTML files, and for those users who have slow, modem-based connections to the Internet, Acrobat will be spelled "molasses."
Macromedia Director, the multimedia tool that handles animation and other whiz-bang stuff, has been a staple of the executive-presentation set for years. Easy, it is not. A friend of mine (whose previous computer background consisted of using an ATM) spent the last five years learning and teaching the program. Words to note: "five years."
Further problems for Director, vis-a-vis the Web, are file sizes---in the Director world, even the biggest Acrobat file would be called puny. So, a steep learning curve and large file sizes will probably relegate Director's Web presence to those applications with Ethernet connections (not the newspaper biz).
That leaves us with Java, the new programming language written by the folks at Sun, makers of the hunky SPARC workstations. Java's claim to fame is that it is an object-oriented language (that means it has reusable code) optimized for the creation of programs that run on remote machines---like the way the Web uses a browser, only more complex.
Sun has created its own browser for Java (called HotJava) that takes a small amount of data from the host, downloads it to the user's machine and then runs an application on the user's machine. That application could be animation or it could be something complex like a game, a survey or a test.
Sun has created HotJava browsers for only three operating systems---SPARC-based Solaris (Sun's own OS), Windows NT and, by the time you read this (probably), Macintosh.
By licensing Java, Netscape promises to have this remote-application technology available for virtually all operating systems---most specifically, Windows 95.
The security ramifications of Java are immense---what's to prevent a bad guy from embedding code on his Web page that seizes my hard disk and erases it? But as with previously insurmountable Web problems that have subsequently been surmounted, this too will pass.
No, the biggest news for newspapers is that Java will probably become as ubiquitous as PostScript. Much as newspapers had to internally grow PostScript and HTML experts, they will have to grow Java experts---despite the fact they don't teach Java in college.
Cole is San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and is editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, cole@plink.geis.com; phone, (415) 673-2424; fax, (415) 673-2449.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.