I agree totally: Clever and (with some clever client coding) maybe even convenient -- those of us on OpenOffice.org desktops have also been waiting for this for hundreds of years: Techstuff.ca tips us to Avery labels online !(right)!

Avery is making it easy for anyone to prepare documents for easy printing, even without special software. Avery Print helps you prepare the text and images you want, then creates a page in PDF format, which can be viewed and printed on any printer using Adobe's free Acrobat Reader software.

And reasonably painless too, for a multi-page webform, thoughtfully complete with decent clip-art and backing textures, a selection of fonts and every opportunity to back up and change your mind. Brill score, but it's still not quite what I'd really want in such a service ...

The smart part

What I like about Avery's offering is my not having to keep all those hundreds of product templates cluttering my word-processor or art design software, and allowing Avery the option to add to the list and control what they own, the formats. That's good stuff, it hands control to the people who own the knowledge and saves me from tracking their updates lest I use an obsolete format on a modern label form.

spelling out 'net integration'

But colour me a network junkie, what I want to see is this very same online service, not for human consumption that requires my typing into a webform every time I do a label --- I want a service for my machine, a webservice hook directly from my desktop content-creation software, a locally managed interface where I control the knowledge I own, where I keep my local preferences for my personal opus of label types and stylesheet choices.

All I should need to do is file each form once, and there after I hit the connection with a POST request with my data, and get back the nice, portable PDF ready for the print-out. Need envelopes or CD-labels? No problem, I'd have a route to go directly from my CD-burning software to a full disk-sticker and jewel-case at the click of a button that just says burn. Given druthers of label brands, I'd take Avery just for this sort of thoughtful how-it-is-used service, and given druthers, I'd side with desktop software aware of this open API.

REST is best

Here now, though, is maybe one of the best illustrations of the superiority of the REST webservice model vs the vendor-dished SOAP: In Avery's defence, I suspect my wish-list dream-connector is probably latent in their design, at least easily crafted simply because it is rooted in plain, simple and ubiquitous HTTP!

I'll have to poke into their final click-through page to be sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a cleverly crafted POST containing all the right form values just might seed their servlet with everything it needs to respond with the PDF, throwing the whole task of building my Avery-API connector right back on my own lap ... or better still, maybe this get my labels job is one worth pitching to the LazyWeb ...

Maybe even intentionally, Avery has been exceedingly clever in providing a useful webservice that works from just about any interface, including web-forms, requiring little more than a bit of libwww perl hacking to build that bridge from my SimpleCDR directly into pretty print disk label. Done this way, there's another benefit because while Avery keeps their knowledge of their printer forms and I keep my knowledge of what exactly I want printed into those forms, the SimpleCDR authors are freed from tinkering with the printer module (aside from a basic print for the net impoverished), concentrating their talents on their knowledge of simplifying the scheduling a CD-R burn.

Harambe! Working together, everybody gets their IP and voilà a loosely-coupled and highly future-proof software system that actually does something useful!