XML will recreate how web-applicationws
are done. XML will not replace HTML on the client. But XML will make come
true the vision that didnt work with applets - data across the wire and
decentral applications.

We will see a future, where the client loads a HTML document, that only
contains DHTML and Javascript. On basis of this very thin client, the
browser will load a collection of stylesheets (some of these will even
allready be cached on the client), and then requests a XML-dataset from the
server. With this material the client will present the user for several
screens, before having to request the next datastack/webpage/stylesheets
(for those of you who has done some WML, this might sound similiar).

So the good old WWW, where browsers inefficiently requests one after another
of HTML pages from the server, and uses a lot of bandwidth, will become
replaced by a A2A network, where some the Application to Application traffic
goes on between very thin clients (html/XML/XSLT/Javascript clients) and XML
information servers / HTML servers.

http://www.tamino.com

…unfortunately you can currentely still not target such an architecture in intRAnet applications as public Internet developments are still very much limited by the old BROWSERs that must be supported.

Typically, public Web projects still imposes Netscape4/IE4 support.

One night I dreamt that the Web had standardized a ‘browser obsolescence’ in HTTP content-negociation… Unfortunately I waked up.

Still, XML ‘behind the Web’ is still very much interesting of course! But HTML/simple_javascript is still the target for dissemination.

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Software AG Belgium, Professional Services Division