title: What's the point of XPS?
body: <p>When I read books about WPF, I saw the authors mention XPS like it was something important. Windows also includes its XPS viewer, and I've seen that listed as a "feature" of Windows.</p>
  
  <p>But why? What's the point? Who the heck uses it? It's my understanding that XPS is, basically, like PDF, xhtml, or ePub (which is just xhtml)...or even Word's <em>docx</em> format. Many of the features are the same among those formats.</p>
  
  <p>It doesn't seem to have any major benefits compared to any of those other formats. It seems to me that xhtml would be so much more useful than XPS as a way to save and load FlowDocuments from the RichTextBox. I've looked at multiple blogs about converting between the two. Most or all of the rich text on the internet is (x)html.  Beyond that, I don't think anyone uses it just to publish their docs; PDF is preferred. It seems like XPS is just some random format that MS made and decided to push. I generally love MS, but they do have a habit of that kind of thing. Couldn't MS have made an api using xhtml instead? That would have been more useful in a lot of situations, I'd think.</p>
  
  <p>So, is there a point to using XPS, particularly in comparison to one of the other formats I mentioned (or any I haven't)? Have you ever used XPS in your programs or otherwise?</p>