Keynote Really is XML

jonknee writes "During the latest MacWorld keynote, Steve Jobs announced new presentation software dubbed Keynote. It looked pretty sweet, but what caught my ear was Jobs' remark that it was XML based. As soon as I got my hands on Keynote, I investigated the .key file and found its XML portion (which is quite excellent XML at that). For those not lucky enough to have the software, I posted the blank presentation I took a peek at." I just want to know when someone is going to write up a Keynote module for Perl ...

Comments

Re:Could be a nice thing, if ...

[srinner]

During the presentation Jobs mentioned, that you could for instance create presentations with scripts connected to your acounting-system to reflect your current numbers - so I assume Apple won't prosecute others for creating the files

XML is not a panecea

[Anonymous Coward]

Look. When is it going to get through people's heads that just because data has an XML representation it means you can instantly decipher the contents of the data? XML is a data format, that's all. Without a well-defined semantics it is no easier reverse-engineer XML than it is to reverse engineer a binary format. Sure, it may *look* human readable, and it may make it only marginally easier to achieve 99% compatability, but it's the last 1% that will always stifle the ability to write filters for KeyNote, Word, or (pick you favorite "We do XML therefore we are open" software).

That said, I would not be at all surprised if Apple published a Keynote XML schema and semantic specification, once the product has stablized. They'd better, if they want to see their vision come to light.

Re:XML is not a panecea

[Ivan Raikov]

Without a well-defined semantics it is no easier reverse-engineer XML than it is to reverse engineer a binary format.

True, but what sane programmer will use XML as a mere wrapper for Base64-encoded binary data? Outside of Microsoft, anybody with reasonable programming experience will indeed use XML as it's meant to be used, and adhere to strict, well-documented (and hopefully published) semantic specifications. While Apple software certainly has its issues, I think we should give them a little more credit this time.

Re:Could be a nice thing, if ...

[Void]

nice, nice, very nice. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the powerpoint-era?

Re:Could be a nice thing, if ...

[sean23007]

Yup, that would make a lot of sense. Apple sues someone for making a "compatible" file format to their new XML-based format that is created by the program that reads and saves to Microsoft's proprietary file format. They did it, and if they have any sense of justice, they will let us do it too...

I'm not saying that we are guaranteed to be able to, just that Apple probably won't make much of a stink, considering that one of the major draws of their program is that they were able to do that to another format.

Re:Could be a nice thing, if ...

[dhovis]

Steve Jobs said in his presentation that he envisions people writing programs to auto-generate Keynote files. That is why they chose XML. Apple intends it to be open and easy to use.

The thing about Keynote that sets it apart (in my mind), is that it is a presentation program that is geared towards computer presentations, rather than slides or overheads. I doubt Apple considers Keynote a "core" application, but rather a showpiece for what you can do with Quartz, Quartz Extreme (for the Open GL effects), and the Cocoa API. They throw in the professionally designed slide templates as a bonus.