The technology of electronic publishing is developing rapidly by taking advantage of the Internet and, particularly, the World Wide Web. As the Web has created an unprecedented demand for interoperability, the work of standards and other consensus-developing groups takes on particular importance.

The O'Reilly Online Publishing Report is a monthly newsletter that tracks the development and eventual standardization of specifications for the technologies used to format, archive, search, and present documents online, and the related field of information retrieval from electronic documents. These are the technologies in practical use today by online publishers, their editors and document managers, and countless consultants who create new content, give new life to old content, move content from format to format, and present it to their online readers.

Terry Allen has been tracking the standards development for online publishing for years. Each month he'll update the shifting landscape of online publishing technology, assessing the impact of new developments and reporting on the latest in new technology and the standards process.

In the O'Reilly Online Publishing Report, Terry:

• Reviews and comments on proposals to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for revisions and extensions to the HTML specification and other related specifications (URLs, MIME types for SGML).
  • Keeps us up-to-date on standards development in other forums.
  • Keeps an eye on how closely popular browsers adhere to standards.
  • Follows the efforts of digital librarians to establish bibliographic standards to aid indexing and information retrieval on the Internet.
  With the first issue, subscribers will receive a free copy of the 1995 Online Publishing Review, a booklet providing background information on topics covered in the newsletter.