What is (was) XPS documents?

Time-saving tip

Part of this post was written long back and now I am completing as part of clearing my draft posts. This may not be relevant to the reader and may skip rest of this post.

What is XPS document

Simply "It is an XML-based (XAML-based) fixed-document format. Microsoft developed it and ECMA adopted it as standard 388. It is basically a zip file that we can simply open by changing the extension. This information can easily be obtained from Wikipedia.

This was Microsoft's answer to Adobe PDF. As always it is expected to kill PDF and long life. Unfortunately, the fate of WPF and XAML followed this as well. When the WPF declined this format also sidelined. In fact, it was not able to create much momentum in the first place. Microsoft included the XPS printer driver and all but fewer users tried it. As usual, there seems no official farewell ceremony from Microsoft's side similar to Silverlight and many other technologies.

Advantages

One advantage of XPS is the programmatic support in WPF to create an XPS document without any third party library that we need for PDF. But again a limited use case when we want to print the application screen as is. If its a report, we have a lot more options. With the advent of Electron, there seems no need to create WPF applications.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages were more. Mainly the adoption. All the platforms recognize PDF but less the XPS format. Another simple feature required for document format is to password protect it. XPS doesn't seem to have this basic support.

The advantages and disadvantages are not full. Feel free to add your thoughts in comments.