In any case, Carmen has developed a neat piece of software called, appropriately, Carmen's Headline Viewer. Carmen's Headline Viewer lets you bypass the browser and view the headlines from popular sites in the window of a standalone application, as you can see in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Carmen's Headline Viewer lets you view PalmPower headlines. Click picture for a larger image.

We asked Carmen to help us understand why someone would want to use a standalone application instead of a web browser. Here's what she told us:

Good question. A web browser is a very good general purpose client. It does a lot of things pretty well. It is good for viewing HTML and for interacting with simple sites in a fairly simple and unstructured way.

However, a dedicated application such as my Headline Viewer can be specialized to deal with specific types of content. Because it is structured, more is known about it and more automatic processing can be done. The same data can be presented in multiple views. It can be sorted, filtered, characterized, re-formatted, an so forth.

I see syndicated content and XML bringing some "law and order" to the Web in a way that is not at all heavy-handed. I do hope that the formats stay simple enough so that the barrier to entry is low. There are some big-ticket organizations getting interested in syndication, but that's not where the fun is. The fun is when small sites with interesting and unusual information, gain a wider audience because their content becomes more accessible.

It may take a while, but I can see a time in the future where many of the "clients" on the Web are not humans sitting at Web browsers, but other programs that are locating and pulling down data on behalf of the user. The distinction is somewhat subtle. Right now most of the fetches from the Web are explicit. In my hypothetical future more of them will be implicit.

PalmPower headlines on your Web site
If you're a Web site developer, you can now include the latest PalmPower news headlines and article titles on your site. This will add value to your site by showing your support for PalmPower, and by providing the latest information to your site's visitors. To do this, we make available special "stub" files that you can incorporate into your Web site. Any time our publication is updated, these stub files are updated as well, so you can have the very latest information at all times.

You may notice that some of the URLs are not "clickable". That's because these represent files that are read by programs running on Web servers, rather than files you can get to from your browser. If you can't click it it means you weren't intended to. Also, if you're not a Web master, some of this may be a bit over your head. We don't really have space in this editorial to go into what all of this means.

We provide a number of different formats, depending on your preferences, including Netscape RDF Site Summary format, XML, HTML, and plain text. The following sections describe how to use each.