Internet Publishing Tools Proliferate

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Businesses wanting to publish information on World Wide Web servers will soon have at their disposal a variety of commercial products that let you generate documents in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). The best tool for you depends in part on how often you'll need to update the information that you're publishing on the Internet.

Microsoft has introduced two add-ons that let users of the company's Windows word processor create HTML documents without having to learn a new editing package. The Internet Assistant for Word for Windows lets you create HTML documents. The second add-on, SGML Author for Word, has a conversion facility that converts Word text styles to SGML tags (or vice versa, if you import an SGML file). SGML Author for Word ($595) can generate documents for HTML and more complex DTDs (Document Type Definitions), like the ATA (American Transportation Association) DTD.

Avalanche Development's ((303) 449-5032) SureStyle ($495) complements Microsoft's add-ons. Slated for release by the end of March, SureStyle applies proper style-sheet elements to unstyled or incorrectly styled word documents, making it easier to feed such documents to SGML and HTML authoring systems.

SGML Hammer is another Avalanche product that reads in SGML documents and outputs HTML, CD-ROM, word processing, and database formats. Avalanche's HTML Starter Kit allows authors to transform word processing and desktop publishing documents into HTML documents.

But the information in your electronic catalog may change often. ``Conversion is just the beginning of the battle,'' says Philip Werner, product manager for Internet publishing at Interleaf (Waltham, MA, (800) 955-5323). ``The real battle is in maintenance.''

In addition to guiding you through the conversion of word processing and desktop publishing formats into HTML, Interleaf's Cyberleaf also maintains an internal database of all the hyperlinks within and among documents for a Web. When the content of source documents changes, Cyberleaf will automatically reinsert hyperlinks defined for the previous versions of the document into the updated version. Cyberleaf runs on most Unix operating systems ($795) and, in the first quarter of this year, Windows and Windows NT ($495).

Another approach to HTML translation is to do it on the fly, using source documents stored in the more robust SGML. Electronic Book Technologies' (Providence, RI, (401) 421-9550) DynaWeb is an add-on module to the SGML-based DynaText electronic publishing program. It translates SGML to HTML automatically on an ``as-required'' basis. The program should ship in the first quarter for many Unix platforms.

Information Dimensions' (Dublin, OH, (800) 328-2648 or (614) 761-8083) Unix-based Basis WebServer, which starts at $ 15,000, marries a relational database with HTML publishing. It has a repository that can manage documents in ASCII, word processing, HTML, and SGML formats. ``Instead of the URL referencing a [static] hard-coded document, it can actually be a query against a database,'' says David Bayer, manager of electronic publishing at the company. This approach ensures that the information you publish is as fresh as your most recent database update.