Gartner's crystal
ball predicts "a revolution in Web-based
commercial
publishing activity will result through 2004".
The report highlights the major role to be played
by
XML, particularly in the ICE effort and
the W3C's standards P3P, RDF,
SVG and SMIL.
The full report covers identifies the trends
that will impact the world of commercial
publishing through the next five years, and which
architectural and technological developments will
have the greatest impact.
Not everyone agrees completely, though.
On Scripting News, Dave
Winer notes, while respecting their
influential position, that Gartner "walk the
W3C/Vignette party line", with no mention of
initiatives with "grass-roots" developer support
such as RSS, XML-RPC or SOAP. These
protocols tend to be simpler than the
specifications devised by the W3C, and their very
simplicity encourages fast adoption on the
Internet.
That very popularity has the potential
to eclipse more complex standards with a higher
barrier to entry. Whether the heavyweights like
ICE will turn out
to be more influential is an open question.