Alexandria, VA – Idealliance, the leading developer of industry specifications in the media industry and a global industry association of media creators and technology companies, has released an update to its PROSE/XML specification, a standardized method for Publishers to communicate job specifications to Commercial Printers, Direct Marketers, and Binders. Those who download the schema – available at no charge from Idealliance – will be able to generate the complete documentation set from annotations embedded in the schema using any XML editorial tool. The PROSE Implementation Guide can be downloaded from the Idealliance website.

The PROSE/XML specification began its life as the GCA Production Order Specification for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In 2002, a new version of PROSE transformed this EDI specification into Extensible Markup Language (XML). The first PROSE/XML versions were implemented with an XML Document Type Definition (DTD). “Idealliance recently led a Member Working Group to review the latest version of PROSE/XML. Based on their input, Idealliance has now published a new version of the PROSE/XML specification updated to the more popular XML Schema Definition (XSD) language with additional fields to reflect modern workflow processes of those organizations serving today’s publishers, list processers, and US Postal Service supply chain,“ commented Dianne Kennedy, VP of Digital and Emerging Technologies for Idealliance.

The XML PROSE specification is a standardized method for Publishers to communicate job specifications enforcing certain formats for data, and thereby standardizes the "look" of the data. The XML PROSE Specification rarely defines its content data values. It is left up to the trading partners i.e. printers and publishers, to determine the proper values for the content data transmitted via the XML PROSE specification. The PROSE Implementation Guide can be downloaded from the Idealliance website. Questions may be directed to Dianne Kennedy.