According to a blog in ZDNet, XML traffic will multiply. I am not sure how they got the numbers but even if does 100 or 1000 times, it is significant. Most of the XML generated will be transparent to the users (ajax apps, blogs, Office 2007 etc.).
“It’s still early, but we’re seeing a huge amount of potential interest, and potentially having lots of client-side stuff now starting to generate XML traffic,” Nash said. “Whereas we were seeing a lot of the servers begin to communicate using XML previously, what’s happening here in the AJAX space is, we now have the 100,000-times multiplier of potentially user desktops all beginning to generate XML.” Ditto for Office 2007, which is scheduled for release early next year.
There will be several drivers of XML traffic:
- Microsoft Office 2007
- Open Document Format (ODF) based on XML
- Increase in blogs (both personal and business)
- Web based collaboration (wikis have started using XML format)
- Increase in the number of AJAX applications (both Web and Enterprise)
- RSS feeds as the syndication format (for news, alerts, events)
- Increased use of XML vocabularies (finance, insurance, healthcare, retail)
- Popularization of Microformats
- Web APIs (most of them return data in XML format)
- Increased adoption of both lightweight and heavyweight web-services
- Increased adoption of XAML, XUL, XForms based User Interfaces
- Improvements in Information Visualization (Exploratory Search, Information Browsing etc.)