What is Metro?
At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2005 in April 2005, Microsoft announced that it would include a new document format and printing architecture called Metro in Windows Vista. Based on XML, Metro is to Windows Vista as Adobe PDF is to Mac OS X: It’s a device- and application-independent printing architecture that allows documents to retain their exact formatting in any application, and when printed. Unlike PDF, however, Metro is based on XML and will be released as an open standard. Metro will also incorporate ZIP technology–similar to that used by the next major version of Microsoft Office–to compress and decompress files on the fly. From a technology standpoint, Metro includes an XML-based electronic paper format called Metro Reach, a document viewer for viewing, managing, and printing Metro files, the ability to digitally sign Metro documents, APIs that allow programmers to integrate their applications and services with Metro, a print pipeline, and a new drive
