I'm intrigued by, and have made passing comments during conversations about, an open XML standard for the screenplay format. It really makes me wish I knew more about proposing markup standards and where to even start.

As much as I can hack together helper applications I am not a programmer. I'm quite a distance away from being one actually. If I understood the practical applications and requirements of parsing an XML document in to something that resembles a screenplay then perhaps I'd be a little closer to starting on that journey.

The opportunities it opens are fairly self evident I would think. Clean interoperability across systems and applications, provided they choose to adopt the standard. Ease of formatting and rendering for web pages. Ease of developing new applications by allowing developers to bypass creating a proprietary file format. Possibility of adoption of the screenwriting standard by standard word processing applications.

I think this would be brilliant despite my expectations that the Final Draft folks would likely ignore it for as long as they possibly could. The benefits of being able to collaborate regardless of application would be ideal. As much as I love Celtx I'd like to be able to smoothly send information back and forth with users of other applications. Importing and exporting of formatted plain text is never perfect. When I sit down to write I expect to be able to do just that. I don't want to have to stop to correct formatting issues.

In terms of application development and support, the first thing that jumps out at me is OpenOffice. It should be largely trivial to code a plugin for OpenOffice to support any XML documents including a screenwriting standard. Adoption of the standard, or easy support via plugin, by such a massive cross platform suite would allow anyone to work on a screenplay with proven, stable software. Being able to save in an open format would mean being able to easily transition to new or more specialized software at any time.

I'm sure I'm looking at a pipe dream here considering how small and fragmented the screenwriting community is. The mantra of, "buy Final Draft if you want to be taken seriously," doesn't help either. I'd also rather be writing a screenplay than defining an XML format. For all the reasons it's flawed there are more reasons to imply it's something worth considering.

david shute - Nov 19, 2008 at 11:44 AM