Thursday, 5 July 2007

Microsoft's Adobe Rival Become an ECMA Standard

Microsoft has submitted its XML Paper Specification (XPS) to ECMA International for standardisation. The Seattle based world’s largest software company is taking a...

Microsoft has submitted its XML Paper Specification (XPS) to ECMA International for standardisation. The Seattle based world’s largest software company is taking a similar route taken by Adobe, which, at the beginning of this year, chose to subject its popular PDF to the rigors of the standardisation process at the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

Adobe PDF is by far the most popular document format. However Microsoft’s XML, which is yet to be commercially launched, is still confined to company's own Office suite. The fact that with Open XML (OOXML) one of Microsoft Office's document formats is already an ECMA standard, and will moreover be submitted to the ISO committee at the end of the year, has served to add fuel to the long-running dispute between Open XML supporters and advocates of the Standard Open Document (ODF) format, which has already been established as the norm.