3. Thanks for all the XML
The last four developer conferences I have attended have all had one thing in common: before too long, the presenter has begun showing off raw XML code in a text editor. XML has been held out as the nirvana for information sharing for quite a while now (the original XML specification was finalised in February 1998), and has been the source of numerous derivative standards, but it has taken widespread support for XML as a core data source in developer tools to really cement market acceptance of XML as the way of the future.
That way now seems clearly marked; IDC estimates that the market for XML development tools will be US$395 million annually by 2006. The demand for XML servers will be galloping along at an even more rapid pace, and will top US$3.7 billion a year in the same period.
Much of XML’s appeal also derives from the fact that it provides a means of recycling and repackaging existing content, which is always a popular strategy during tough economic times. “The demand for utilising existing content and the creation of new content on the Web is driving the need for authoring tools that can address personalisation, content delivery channels, and management of vast quantities of content,” says IDC researcher Susan Funke.
Ideally, most of this XML activity will be invisible to end users, who are rather more concerned with the final format in which data is presented than with the esoteric details of how it arrives on their devices. For anyone on the other side of the delivery wall, however, it seems clear that a solid working knowledge of XML will be a key prerequisite for future development (to say nothing of employment). Key standards derived from XML, such as Web Services Description Language (WDSL), will also become increasingly important.
4. Political problems and TV fun
One of the most cherished beliefs about the Internet is that it is essentially unable to be censored. That belief took something of a beating when, despite widespread concern, the Australian government managed to introduce Internet censorship laws in 1999 without the entire digital economy collapsing. (Well, OK, a lot of the digital economy did collapse, but even a hardened cynic like this writer thinks it would be grossly unfair to lay the entire blame for this at the feet of Senator Alston.)
But if Australia’s attempts at Net censorship ultimately ended up as a very minor blip on the digital radar, the same can’t be said of recent developments in China. A six-month study by researchers from Harvard Law School found that Chinese authorities routinely blocked access to up to 19,000 Web sites. And while Australia seemed largely concerned with limiting access to pornography and bomb-making instructions, China only blocked 15 percent of adult sites accessed in the test, concentrating on restricting sites with information on political subjects deemed unsuitable for the general populace. This demonstrated ability to control Internet access on a massive scale suggests that the ongoing battle between freedom-of-speech advocates and those who believe that greater control over content available online is needed is not going to slow down any time soon.
One key advocate for the latter argument is the entertainment industry, which continues to launch lawsuits against peer-to-peer file sharing systems as fast as they can pop their heads above the digital parapet. To date, those efforts have proved ineffective at stopping the phenomenon of mass content sharing, and have resulted in counter-suits from consumers who object to being characterised as thieves. However, music industry executives will doubtless be encouraged by the example that China provides, even as they struggle to work out how to stop the country’s rampant pirating of physical entertainment media.
Not that China is alone when it comes to piracy. A recent study by Gartner G2 found that 82 percent of US consumers believed it should be legal to make back-up copies of DVDs, music CDs, and games software, and court cases in Australia have upheld the rights of consumers to modify games consoles to enable them to play copied discs. Combine this with increasingly cheap broadband services and it doesn’t look like there’ll be a clear resolution to the problem of how the Internet might become an industry-sanctioned entertainment medium, and what laws will govern it if it does.
5. The five senses
Internet services have long provided visual stimuli in the form of text and images, and have also proved useful in the distribution of audio materials. However, they have lagged behind when it comes to delivering on the other sense modalities of touch, taste, and smell. While there have been some minor smell-o-vision style prototypes to deal with the last area, the most promising developments have been, perhaps surprisingly, in the area of touch.
In a recent demonstration, a surgeon in Australia was able to guide a trainee in Sweden through a virtual gall bladder removal operation using a standard Internet connection. “The trainee could feel the instructor guiding his hand around the scene, even though they were on opposite sides of the world,” says CSIRO virtual reality researcher Chris Gunn. “They could also co-operatively feel, stretch and manipulate a simulated gall-bladder, liver and bile duct, and guide each others hands as though they were in the same operating theatre,” he says.
This was partly achieved using a CSIRO developed “haptic workbench”, which allows the manipulation of 3D objects using touch-sensitive tools, but network control issues were also important. “Our software is able to handle the problems of network latency and jitter,” says Gunn. “A collaborative virtual environment such as this one contains a lot of information. The trick is to decide what information to pass between the two computers and make sure that only the most vital information gets high-priority. The demonstration runs over a standard Internet connection that travels at least 22,000km across two oceans and one continent.” While immediate applications for the technology are being developed in the health arena, it could also be applicable to a wide range of other training applications. There’s also probably a healthy market in the adult services area, but we’ll let that pass for now.
The problems of transmitting touch data also highlight one of the key areas where advances need to be made in Internet technology: the ability to guarantee quality of service (QOS). QOS has traditionally been a problem for standard IP networks, which prioritise the eventual and complete delivery of information over providing consistent connection speeds. As telcos introduce support for technologies such as MPLS (multiprotocol label switching), predictable QOS should become achievable, opening the possibility of more reliable virtual private networks and high-quality videoconferencing.
7%
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