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.