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Comment by boomlinde | Hacker News Reader

The site in question lists several alternatives, some of which are widely in use especially in cases where XML falls short: brevity, fast to parse, easily readable... Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless.

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I am working for many years in the publishing business (dealing with structured documents, product data etc.). I can tell you, that all of my customers are more open XML than any other document formats (there exist none as suitable for the job).

You can call me clueless or dishonest, I don't care. I can only share my experience with the topic. You don't have to believe me.

Your customers in the field you work in, perhaps, but it's hard to tell that's what you mean when you write data exchange. It's a wide field that is not limited to the publishing business or your customers.

> Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless

It is in fact the de facto standard in the publishing industry. The "other" format is of course PDF.

Maybe all of this will change when we have more technologies that support formats that can handle mixed content as easily as XML.

Does anyone use Microsoft XPS? It looked rather interesting; like PDF without any interactivity (except for links) and with special support for publishing (color management, job tickets, etc.). And internally it is a collection of XML docs and binary data zipped together into a single file; pretty neat, must be easier to use in automated workflows.

I can't answer the question but anyway:

None of my customers have ever asked for that. I have not seen a printing house that demands XPS. So I doubt that it plays any role in the market (Germany here).

Thanks, that's informative. I haven't seen it used much either; the only real use I saw (aside from viewing) was an XPS printer driver for a Canon inkjet printer. (I've also heard that it produced better results than the standard driver, but have no first-hand experience.)

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