Forgotten Technologies: QuarkImmedia

Now almost everyone knows what technology is Adobe Flash. Talking about SVG and Silverlight has also become very popular. Meanwhile, all these technologies were not the first and did not appear from scratch. More than a decade ago, there have been attempts to add multimedia and interactive features to boring and dull HTML . And if the Macromedia Shockwave technology to one degree or another has remained alive (in fact, Flash has emerged from Shockwave), then another well-known product of those years has been undeservedly forgotten. It's about QuarkImmedia.


Unfortunately, the company Quark Inc. I strongly disowned my once very revolutionary product, so it’s almost impossible to find any information about Immedia on the official website. Yes, and other sources for some reason do not indulge. Only the German version of Wikipedia gives at least some information .
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At one time I had a chance to work a bit with Immedia and visit several sites made using this technology. Among the users of Immedia were very well-known brands. For example, Cartier, Hasbro, Washington Post and Deutche Welle.

So, it all started in the mid -90s , when the Internet experienced the era of a rather poor set of HTML 3.2, the lack of normal ways of style markup and visualization, and the multimedia capabilities were limited only by embedding quickTime objects in the pages.

The small company FutureWave Software, formed in 1993, developed the SmartSketch editor, which formed the basis of the company's next product, FutureSplash Animator. This program allows you to quickly and easily create simple vector animation. It did not gain much popularity, but it attracted the attention of a well-known brand in the graphics market. The company Macromedia, involved in the competition with Adobe and Corel, has acquired all the achievements of FutureWave. The ability to stream data over the network was added, and in 1995 the first plug-in to Netscape Navigator 2 appeared, allowing you to view videos in the Shockwave format: this is how they called their new technology in Macromedia. A year later, the further development of the initial developments from FutureSplash was presented. This product was named Shockwave Flash (Future + Splash). In the future, Flash finally separated from the Shockwave and gained unheard of popularity. Ironically, Macromedia was later bought by its eternal rival, so we have been enjoying Adobe Flash for several years now.

The booming new technology and the rapidly growing interest in it could not fail to attract the attention of other giants of the industry. Microsoft began developing its own engine for vector interactive animation, but the real incarnation of Silverlight was only relatively recent.

Adobe tried to use the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standard as a basis, but somehow it was sluggish and unconvincing. Adobe relied heavily on Acrobat technology, which excluded multimedia and interactive features, but the PDF format was ideal for publishing various types of documents when it was necessary to completely preserve the look and feel of the folded text.

And finally, Quark Inc. entered the game, hitherto known only because of its one product - QuarkXPress. This package for professional layout has gained particular popularity among designers as a truly powerful and convenient tool for creating catalogs, books, newspapers and magazines.

Just at that time, Adobe began developing the mysterious "killer QuarkXPress" codenamed K2. Later, the program was called InDesign and nearly drove QuarkXPress out of the desktop publishing market, so Quark was pretty tight at one time. However, the situation may change again with the release of the announced QuarkXPress 8 .

Fearing a decline in the popularity of XPress and the possible development of the situation in favor of Adobe (and, as you know, Adobe is famous for buying up its former competitors), Quark decided to go ahead and do something that would both be ahead and make serious competition. Adobe products.

So a very curious product was born, called Immedia. What was its appeal? And why is it virtually unknown today?

In some ways, QuarkImmedia is a competitor of two technologies at once: Flash and Acrobat.

That is, Immedia can be considered as a kind of PDF equivalent with a good set of extensions for working with multimedia, animation, and interactive features. Of course, the desktop publishing company focused mainly on the visual presentation of the data, and therefore it was important to preserve the integrity of the documents laid out in QuarkXPress. But if PDF could be just a part of the site, a kind of add-on that opens when you click on a link, then the result of Immedia could be the site itself !


Indeed, the Immedia page could contain any number of columns of text typed according to all the rules of typography (in any font, with kerning, ligatures and other nuances), tables, images and animations, video clips, as well as navigation and interaction tools (menus, buttons, forms , etc. ). No wonder that Immedia actively began to use for the creation of sites of newspapers and magazines.

It is noteworthy that a separate Immedia editor did not exist, but there was only XTension, an extension for QuarkXPress, which adds a separate menu item and a set of palettes for managing objects to the program. So designers were offered a very convenient way to create a full-fledged site. The designer created the text and images in a familiar environment, with the help of simple manipulations he added the necessary interactivity and structurally linked the various pages of the future site, absolutely without resorting to any programming!

Today this aspect may seem quite controversial. After all, no modern Flash-site can do without the use of a variety of scripts. But for the vast majority of needs, the possibilities that existed in Immedia were quite enough. In any case, I have seen some Immedia sites that are very interesting in their design, which are not inferior in terms of the wealth of possibilities and beauty to many modern Flash sites . In addition, the text looked much better in Immedia, because Flash still has very limited and not very impressive text processing capabilities, and high-quality anti-aliasing has appeared only relatively recently.


Alas, Immedia technology was destined to die. The reason is quite banal. Quark didn’t make the effort to promote its own product. In addition, this brand has always stood alone. Almost never heard of any kind of association, cooperation and serious partnership on the part of Quark Inc. The same Adobe, right and left, entered into various alliances, enlisted the support of manufacturers of popular browsers, and at the same time bought everything that comes to hand of the company and development. In addition, the solution was quite expensive: the expansion separately cost $ 995, and with the QuarkXPress package - about $ 2,000, which not everyone can afford. Plus, the format was completely closed, and therefore third-party developers could not create alternative Immedia development tools. Users were forced to buy expensive XPress and no less expensive XTtension.

All this was the reason for the fact that Adobe products, the company itself, in fact, not developed from scratch, but once bought from third-party companies (from Adobe’s own developments, can only be called Illustrator and Acrobat), now occupies a leading position in the industry.

As in the case of Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime, Silverlight and other extensions for HTML , websites using QuarkImmedia could only be viewed by installing the appropriate browser plugin (supported by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer). Immedia Viewer was also released as a separate application for MacOS and Windows platforms. But, for some strange reason, Quark was not in a hurry to cooperate with browser manufacturers, and therefore the plug-in could only be downloaded on the company's website. It was never included in the standard delivery of popular browsers like Flash and QuickTime extensions. The Immedia file player itself was relatively small, but there was not enough information, advertising, and simply the diligence of Quark marketers for Internet users to rush to download Immedia Viewer.


The technology remained known in very narrow circles, and therefore after version 1.5, released in 1999 as part of the QuarkXPress 4.1 package, finally rested in Bose. QuarkXPress version 5 has already been released without Immedia add-on. And a little later, any references to Immedia on the Quark website were deleted. Replaced by the package Quark Interactive Designer (QID). In fact, this is still the same extension for QuarkXPress, but it allows you to convert collapsed XPress documents into Flash SWF format. Approximately the same thing can be done by Adobe InDesign, so that users of both publishing systems have the ability to create Flash sites directly from their favorite programs.

However, this is another story. After all, what is now a bunch of InDesign + Acrobat + Flash, has already been to a certain extent implemented a dozen years ago. It is a pity that Immedia was so easily and quickly forgotten. And the manufacturer himself in vain dismissed a rather revolutionary product. If the project had a proper development, who knows, perhaps today we would enjoy high-quality Immedia-sites . After all, the average data transfer rate has significantly increased, and display devices (monitors) have improved significantly since then. Therefore, it is not problematic to download a one and a half to two megabyte file, which contains all the necessary information presented in the best possible way.

Now we have to watch the development of Adobe Flash + AIR + Flex, as well as the young, but very promising development of Microsoft Silverlight.

Although, in fairness, it should be noted that QuarkImmedia still remains one of the most extensive in its implementation of hypermedia .

PS I apologize for the quality of the submitted screenshots. Alas, it turned out to be almost impossible anywhere to find normal images of Immedia sites or screenshots of the application itself. Immedia just deleted from the history of the web ...