Frank Willison, editor-in-chief at O'Reilly and Associates, offers a different take on XML's future based on his experience at the XMLDevCon 2001 conference.

Willison saw two major directions at the conference - abstraction and metadata. He takes a fairly close look at Henry Thompson's keynote address, exploring how XML is processed by the XML family of specifications, and also explores the role of namespaces. On the metadata side, Willison examines the many Web services discussions at the conference, and then moves into 'interesting ideas'.

Willison concludes on a rather different note, suggesting that abstraction may take us into some rather different realms than the expected computing nirvana.