XML co-editor Tim Bray declared that the web moves too slowly - it's becoming boring and it's time to get XML in front of people.

Closing the first morning of conference sessions at XML Europe 2001, Tim Bray has suggested that, contrary to popular belief, the Web has not fundamentally changed since 1994 and that it's time to plan the next move.

The web architecture has remained based on clients sending URIs to servers and receiving back documents (HTML, Jpeg, etc.) through HTTP and its main strength is the standardization that has enabled its wide adoption.

The main innovation since 1994 has been XML, but even though XML is getting widely adopted on the server side and between servers (web services), there is nothing new in user interaction because the repartition of tasks between clients and servers is remaining too asymmetrical. The web architecture is, in this respect, a regression when compared to the client/server architecture that it has wiped out.

This leads to a frustrating experience for the users: the Web is slow, web sites look all the same, and the Web has become boring!

To change this, Bray suggested, XML and P2P are showing the way: we must get XML in front of people.

This is the bet made by Antarcti.ca, Bray's company that is developing rich graphical user interfaces that exploit, using Javascript in user agents, XML documents sent by servers. They focus on graphical representations of web resources as maps or 3D.

Bray did not approach the thorny question of the compatibility of such applications between user agents and devices.