It's March Madness again, which means it's time to root for underdogs and lesser-knowns. So there's no better time to take a look at Unipage, a new and interesting challenge to the PDF standard.

"Uni-what?" you might ask, and rightly so. If you're a PC user, download the latest version and check it out.

Unipage is a soon-to-be-open-source project led by programmer G. Zaslavsky.

"At the superficial level and initial stage, [Unifier] is merely a convenience utility for saving Web pages," Zaslavsky wrote in an e-mail while traveling to Nepal.

"However, the point isn't only to have a single file, but also to work around all of today's browsers' handicapped ability of saving pages for offline or for editing. They don't save all the linked components."

Zaslavsky said that in its present incarnation, it's sort of like Acrobat's Web Capture tool, or "magic HTML."

So you can think of Unipages as PDF files, and its companion PC app, Unipage Unifier, as Acrobat Ultra Lite. Soon, Unifier will be a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It's so new, it's like pre-release Acrobat from the "Camelot" era. Got it?

But don't look at Unipage as just "in the rough" software. It's already caused spirited debate on Slashdot about what it could become.

Zaslavsky's team plans to move ahead and build Unipage into an open-source challenger to Acrobat and PDF. It won't be challenging in an apples-to-apples way so much as a "VHS versus Betamax" way: Unipages won't print exactly the same in every setting like PDF, because they're based on HTML. They will, however, unlike PDF, render on any Web-enabled device.

But who would use it?

"When trying to save or send online pages you can never rely on sending a link to a page, as pages keep changing and the viewer may see a different page than you originally saw," Zaslavsky said.

"Further, you may want to send a page that can't be accessed freely, such as in a personal account zone of a site or an Intranet. With Unipage, Jane will choose "Send as Unipage" from the menu in her browser and when Sally opens it [in her own default browser] she will see the exact same page."

That makes Unipage an archiving tool, too, along the lines of the way some firms use PDF to archive their Web sites, taking a snapshot of the content and code at a particular moment in time.

Upcoming Unipage releases include Firefox and IE plug-ins that make those browsers a Unipage viewer and creator in one. A Mac OS version of Unifier is in the works, too. It's at this point that the potential installed base rockets past that of Adobe Reader. Don't take lightly a product that can reach further than Acrobat or even Windows, into Blackberrys, Web phones or anything that can parse HTML.

Zaslavsky sees the potential for Unipage to leave Acrobat and PDF in the dust.

But it's a long road from here to where Acrobat is, and open-source software has its pros and cons. Zaslavsky sees a Unipage as potentially extensible as Adobe Acrobat, attracting an eventual ecosystem of third-party developers pitching in to create tools for editing Unipages with word-processor interfaces, and wizards for creating Unipages from a wide range of templates.

The short cut to rapid deployment, if that ever comes, will be free distribution.

What about security?

But the key to PDF's success—and the source of many users' frustration—is that the documents remain locked down and really can't be edited easily, if at all.

Unipage, if it one day made a play for PDF's iron grip on the secure electronic document space of big finance, law and government work—not to mention the architecture and engineering world—might have to come up with ways of giving business security features and the ability to lock down content.

In my position, I see a lot of PDF-making software, and I've seen the rise and fall of competing document formats. I've got this feeling about Unipage. It's quirky, and it's really, really early in development. At the moment it looks like rickety freeware, not world-beating technology.

Yet there's something about it that tells me Unipage eventually, in some more evolved rev, will find some good use out there in e-doc land. Some Unipages will take the place of more than a few PDFs. Enough PDFs for Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to take notice? If it did, it'd be like Albany knocking off UConn in March Madness on a buzzer-beating three-pointer.

Envisioning the future

Zaslavsky's vision is part of why I think Unipage might chew up more PDF business than, say, Microsoft Reader or Microsoft InfoPath technologies.

"It's clear that with the explosion of non-printed viewing media (and in the near future digital ink?)," Zavlasky said, "we will have to gradually let go of thinking in terms of printed pages."

Are you listening, Bruce Chizen? This guy's on to something. At the very least, Zaslavsky is banging around at bottom rungs of the electronic document ladder, appealing to users who'd buy Acrobat Elements in a heartbeat if individual users could buy single copies (they can't).

Finally. Unipage does something Battleship Acrobat can't: It makes uncomplicated electronic documents cheap, fast and easy. Keep your eye on this. It's just an idea right now, but in five years, with a little luck, Unipage could become a cult … and finally, a force.

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