Seen and Noted
A few things to note:
- A very cool white-board demo you have to see. Posted on Nils van Boxsel's blog (who has a lot of interesting things up on his blog).
- I noticed that Adobe has announced a new project called 'Mars'. It seems to be essentially a PDF replacement using XML, SVG and ZIP: "Mars documents can be created by using XML components representing pages and the overall document structure and then combining them in a Zip package using off-the-shelf XML and ZIP tools". Sound familiar? Normally I wouldn't comment on such things, but given the never ending questions we get about XPS being a 'me too' document format, and how much we have educated the industry about the benefits of a document format 'really' being built using open standards like XML and ZIP - it is nice to see such a pure validation of our approach. All of us in Bldg 2 are deeply flattered.
- We announced a few weeks back about XPS going to a standards body. There were some articles in the last week or so quoting a Microsoft executive that said we were not doing that. That was not accurate - he was ill-informed. We are still planning on taking XPS to a standards body.
- Retail Packaging for Windows Vista and Office 2007 has been revealed. Check it out at the Windows Vista Blog. Looks very cool.
- Andy