Flutterby™! :

I've ragged on XML a lot, and I've expressed my complaints with the philosophy underlying XML-RPC before in this forum, but the XML-RPC interface for Manila spec coupled with some things Lindsay Marshall has talked about (throwing together lots of cross platform apps in Tcl/Tk), and some stuff I discussed with Carl Coryell-Martin, and whether or not I like the underlying technologies it's clear that desktop apps that communicate with the web are coming fast and hard. It also seems clear that your average user doesn't want the mental abstraction that I'm thinking about when I preach "no new user interfaces", that new extremely limited applications that force a structure and way of thinking (Microsoft calls them "wizards") are going to be popular.