I've just read Meg's Dial-Up Revelations at O'Reilly, and some things annoyed me... First, it's not pain au chocolate but pain au chocolat. (The only point in this first remark is to prevent people from reading further, they'll just say "those french are so arrogant" and leave, goodbye.)

The real thing that annoyed me is the correlation made between latest technology and standards vs. efficiency in data transfer (thus the dial-up). Does a RSS feed give me more than I had more than 10 years ago with Gopher? It's just a sacralization of the "XML over HTTP" couple, the true magical "one size fits all" technology of the future... And for the CSS, from where did come the bloat in HTML that CSS remove? From Netscape right, the guys that today sell us `the standard, nothing more, nothing less`. Isn't it ironic?

(Why are my writing always more harsh than my thoughts?) What I know is that the web is still young, the standards of today are going to change dramatically within 10 years, and that I really don't know what it'll look like in 30 years. As such, XML as the unique foundation for all future communications in our i11l world doesn't convince me, and we should go on moving forward, and not be stopped by standards. Just regarding application protocols, today are still alive NNTP, IRC, SMTP, FTP, HTTP... many have faded away, some are still not there: instant messenging, broadcasting, remote procedure call... It takes time to settle down, IPv6 is going to bring a new field of challenge and opportunities for instance.

To end up this messy post, I'll just precise that I'm a DSL user in France (not an early adopter), we've got electrity, heating and even television. We don't like to eat in a rush, and when we are, it's just a question of asking for the last meal and the check at the same time, or just go up an pay while quitting :-)