No news on MARS so Acrobat 9 is a mystery so far

I don't understand it. As far as I can tell there is no news about MARS, the XML friendly rewrite of PDF that was launched soon after the release of Acrobat 8. Version 9 is now available with lots of Flash but my current thought is to understand where things come from before rushing into video etc. I like YouTube by the way, but most PDFs I know about in organisations are mostly about text and graphics as in flat, usually a rectangle that stays the same size.

In live time more or less, let us check the blogs.

Mars blog updated Oct 3 2007. Inside PDF updated Jan 28th.

Other info about MARS? Can't find any.

My speculation, Adobe expect the world of PDF to become a commodity very soon so something Flash is urgent. However it still might repay some attention. Going from XML sources to something that can be published is almost a universal concern.

It was strange that Microsoft announced support for ODF as of 2009. What will actually happen is yet to be seen but it could be that XML formats as open standards are just accepted as inevitable. Which is ok except for a PDF format that was written before XML was around.

Meanwhile in Google Docs the new support for reading a PDF is working ok. Not sure how it is done, appears not to be Flash. But text selection is possible and right click copies a graphic of the page. Just need a crop tool somewhere. My impression of Google Docs is that they are actually interested in documents as most people undersand them. the idea that a web page has to start with a Flash animation or video is not shared by everybody.

Anyway, main point, any news about MARS out there?