Kurt made mention of Adobe MARS in a comment to my “DIRTY LITTLE* post from a couple days ago, and given the fact that Kurt is *MUCH* more qualified to provide proper commentary on this, I will leave it to him to do just that.
In the mean time, a couple of snippets from Eliot Kimber’s recent post to whet your appetite,
Dr. Macro’s XML Rants: Adobe MARS: Looks Interesting
MARS is an XML-based format that is intended as a functional replacement for PDF. It’s not really accurate to call it an XML version of PDF because it’s not a simple transliteration of PDF into tags (which could be done easily enough) but a ground-up exercise in designing and XML-based scheme for doing what PDF does.
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MARS tries to use standards as much as it can and it seems to do so to a remarkable level of completeness. It uses SVG for representing each page, supports the usual standards for media objects (bitmaps, videos, etc.). Uses Zip for packaging, and so on.
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Within Acrobat, the user experience off MARS is identical to that for PDF: all the behavior and functionality is the same. There is a MARS plug-in for Adobe 8 (reader or professional).
More > http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Mars
And if that wasn’t enough, at the bottom of the above linked page, you will find…
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Adobe… YOU ROCK!!! :D
Wait? So we need to get SVG from Adobe now? I thought that they abandoned SVG and we were all supposed to be worried about that. Seems to me a bit of a bait-and-swtich we got going here... step right in, notice the shiny SVG tags there in the window, look at the SVG-print support, shiny fancy PDF-ishness, and ... what's that? Oh no, no... it is called MARS. And oh yeah, of course its a standard. We just made it up and we're all using it. MARS. Joke-tellers, do your worst.