Vignette & Scripting News

Wednesday, February 25, 1998 by Dave Winer.

XML is moving even faster than I thought.

On December 27 we announced that content flowing thru the Scripting News home page would be available in XML format in addition to HTML.

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/scriptingNews.html

Every day, every time there's an update to the home page, the XML file for the day is rebuilt and published.

Vignette 

Vignette is a leading developer of content management software for large-scale sites, such as pathfinder.com and cnet. com. They're on the XML bandwagon, as we are.

Vignette & Scripting News 

This morning, Vignette opened a site that displays a syndicated version of Scripting News that's derived from the XML text our system is generating.

http://demo.vignette.com/publishing/scriptingnews/

As I write this there's an error message on the home page. I guess we still have some digging to do. Click on the Prev links to go back thru previous days, you'll get the idea. Hopefully the problem will be solved soon, either on our end or theirs.

An interesting aside, publishing this DaveNet piece might cure the problem! When it goes out, it will appear on the Scripting News home page, will change the text, and might avoid the problem that's causing the Vignette parser to fail. What a funny world!

Coopetition 

Vignette competes with us in web content management software. Even so, it makes sense for us to bootstrap this new technology in cooperation with them.

We have two sides to our business, one editorial -- Scripting News and DaveNet. On the other side of our Chinese wall, we do content management software. It's a good combination. As our content needs increase, so does the depth of our software.

They're hooking our content flow up to their publishing software. It's like the old days of print publishing. We are a source of editorial content and they are a distributor. We'll probably build on the other side of this connection too. Things are moving quickly.

Ray Noorda, the founder of Novell, called this "coopetition", a mixture of cooperation and competition. It reminds me of the interapplication scripting community on the Mac in the early days. People have to try to get together, even if they compete, perhaps *especially* if they compete. And it's also the way of the net. XML is moving forward thru coopetition. Something interesting is happening. Seriously.

I'm very glad that the Vignette folks accepted our invitation. There will be a lot of firsts in the coming weeks. We're going to try to keep in all the loops. Let me know what you see.

Dave Winer