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====== Is MS extending the battleground? ====== What is Microsoft up to, these days ? ===== Preparing for Web 3.0 ===== Microsoft has just launched a preview of [[http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2B01EC7E-C3B8-47CC-B12A-67C30191C3AA&mg_id=10056&displaylang=en|WPE/F]] (Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere), a browser technology allowing for vector graphics scripted from JavaScript. In fact WPE/F allows for graphical objects described in a subset of [[http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752059.aspx|XAML]], the preferred way of creating user interfaces in Windows Vista. What is interesting is that WPE/F will not only run on Internet Explorer, but also on Firefox and even on Mac OS X (but not on linux). Even though the current [[http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2B01EC7E-C3B8-47CC-B12A-67C30191C3AA&mg_id=10056&displaylang=en|technology preview]] did not support it, eventually WPE/F will allow for .NET managed components to be scripted from the browser as well (this means a subset of the .NET runtime will be ported to Mac OS X!). There is no doubt that even though AJAX-based web apps (such as GMail, [[http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/|SVG]] [[http://www.zkoss.org/zkdemo/userguide/|ZK]] But this new Flash competitor is not the only technology Macromedia/Adobe should be afraid of. Microsoft is also launching their new [[http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx|XPS]] (XML Paper Specification) format. This fixed layout document format will be directly competing with PDF. The preferred picture format [Check] will [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Photo|HD Photo]] (formerly Windows Media Photo), a new compression format, supporting both lossy and lossless compression. It should be able to achieve compression rates comparable to JPEG2000 (or approximately half the file sizes of JPEG for comparable quality - [[http://www.c10n.info/archives/454|more details]]) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=285eeffd-d86c-48c3-ab93-3abd5ee7f1ce&displaylang=en http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/10/09/Office-Open-XML-final-draft_210021002100_.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MXML