XML Reference Guide

Apparently if you have some sort of regular column in anything, it's mandatory to do a list of predictions for the coming year, so before the content gods smite me, here are my predictions for 2005. Some are serious, some are wishful thinking on my part, some are pessimism, and some will likely not actually happen until after the end of this year, but here goes:

1. XML will begin to cease to be a topic in and of itself, as everyone realizes that when you come right down to it, it's just not that complicated. That will change later in the year as the push for binary XML heats up in response to XML's use for larger and larger solutions, leading to larger and larger documents and more and more bandwidth issues. The W3C will lean towards a solution based on ZIP after the dual realizations that it will help some security problems by enabling easy (if inadequate for the long term) encryption, and also that if they don't get off the stick and do something -- soon - that multiple proprietary solutions will become even more entrenched than they currently are and permanently balkanize the field.
2. The industry will finally give in to standard fatigue and it will be very difficult to introduce a new spec -- particularly if it starts with "WS-" -- without very good justification as to a) why it's needed and b) why it can't be covered in any of the existing specs. This will be part of the realization that the industry needs to get off its hiney and start making the existing specs actually work, particularly with regard to security, interoperability, and, as the world shrinks, internationalization. Look also for a tendency to build now and standardize later as people get sick of waiting for specs to actually get finished.
3. People will realize that "service oriented architectures" -- or whatever they wind up being called this year -- have been around since the beginning of time (OK, since before web services) and that they need to be treated like any other development project, with proper architectural planning rather than an ad-hoc, let's-throw-this-thing-together-and-see-what-works approach. SOA and architectural consulting will be the fields to get into if you're looking for that big score.
4. People will also realize that just because it's an SOA doesn't mean you necessarily have to use SOAP, or even what we loosely call Web Services. Look for the development of systems that integrate different types of SOAs and serious time and effort devoted to interoperability as vendors discover that they can keep their proprietary systems in place if they also play nice with everybody else.
5. 2005 will be the year that lots of hype will begin to fall away. Blogging will reach a peak (if it hasn't already). That doesn't mean less people will blog; it just means that there will be fewer "serious" bloggers. Those that remain will continue to try and monetize their blogs but most won't succeed. "Professional" bloggers will increase, but there will be a rough patch as people find it's not as easy as they thought it was, particularly if they're blogging a particular topic. Companies will also have to come to grips with how much freedom they give their bloggers, or risk a loss in credibility.
6. On the other hand, "citizen journalists" will start to be more common, particularly in major events such as natural disasters. News organizations will start to use them, but will try to keep a tight rein on them in order to maintain credibility.
7. This year people will realize the more is not necessarily better and will start to try to filter their lives. RSS and other syndication formats continue their march forward, but aggregators will become a way of life, and better aggregators appear on the scene, providing better control and help with information overload.
8. In that same vein, humans will get re-introduced to areas such as content management, as companies realize that the best content management system on the market can't do as much as one good editor. CMS tools will stick around, though, as an aid to those editors.
9. Also on the subject of filtering our lives, metadata becomes increasingly important, and the push is on for new ontologies. The Semantic Web, however, doesn't happen yet because there is still resistance from those who are convinced it's too complicated. (A large portion of those people will have never read the specifications, mostly because they are too complicated.)
10. And speaking of things that are too complicated, look for sites that release web services APIs to supplement their SOAP APIs with REST APIs, which will see more usage. At least one semi-major web services API will be released in "REST only" form, but a push for credibility -- or possibly, interoperability -- will force the addition of "real" web services.
11. As the number of web services targets increases, look for attacks on these services to spur implementation of security standards. Global terrorists probably won't be involved in these attacks, but "the war on terror" will still be used as an excuse for much of this work.
12. Grid will continue to be lumbered with the perception that it's only helpful to academics. It gets integrated into major products such as Oracle and DB2 -- that's a cheat; it's already happening -- but is considered a semi-useless perk until a killer app, possibly related to gaming, sets things off with a bang later in the year.
13. This is a tie. I can't decide which way it will go. Either:
    
    IBM will realize that they must provide a way for individual developers to use Autonomic Computing without needing a Ph.D in computer science, and will create tools that enable a "plug and play" model for including it in an application. AC begins a slow but steady ascent, as its performance doesn't quite live up to its promise at first.
    
    or
    
    The developer community in general shies away from Autonomic Computing as too much and too complicated for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), and because it's only the mega-corporations using it, AC goes back to being a proprietary (read: pay lots of money for products and services) proposition. It does, however, do better there than it had in the past, and eventually (a couple of years down the line, perhaps) the performance divide between AC haves and have-nots becomes obvious and AC starts once again to trickle down to smaller businesses.
14. Video becomes almost as common as audio online, and both become increasingly searchable, in part -- but not entirely -- due to the increasing use of meta-data. (See number 9.) Podcasting provides a new model for aggregating your own "tv" station online, ala http://www.blogtelevision.com, as people realize they can pull together audio and video from different locations without having to actually own the files.
15. Digital Rights Management becomes a huge issue, but fails to stem the tide of illegal file sharing. In the meantime, artists continue to take their work directly online, bypassing labels completely.
16. Information becomes more readily available from disparate locations and devices such as phones, Blackberries, and iPods.
17. Computer addiction will be recognized as an actual problem, but not, unfortunately, dealt with in any kind of effective way.