But something's wrong with this picture. None of the above has much to do with the way we're using XML, and none seems to have much to do with the way people I talk to in the real worlds of manufacturing or financial services or publishing are using it either.

When I talk to people about how they're really using XML, I detect a few patterns, but they're not the ones I read about in business publications. For example:

What common threads do you see? I see a tendency to improvise, the application of a lot of ingenuity, and an assumption that anything in the world of computing can be made to talk to anything else in the world of computing.

Here's another pattern that I see, kind of a subversive one. There seem to be two kinds of XML-based initiatives out there. In the first, they don't bother too much with the niceties, they just focus on getting some things put together and happening, they make up and refine the messages as they go along, and they've been in production now for six months. The second kind takes a more carefully structured approach, builds things from the schemas out, worries a lot about choreography and data modeling and semantics, and is still in the planning stage, with the revised schedule calling for deployment two quarters from now if things go well.

Admittedly, I'm exaggerating a bit; but not all that much.

Meanwhile, the biggest story in the XML world is happening just off the radar of the prognosticators and executives. It's called RSS, and it's a simple format for pumping the content of dynamic information sources around. It was invented for use by the legions of webloggers, but it's mainstream now; I no longer surf to the New York Times or the BBC or MSDN, I subscribe to them, and when something changes, I get a nice little summary and decide whether I want to check it out.

RSS has never actually been blessed as a standard, and its development has been fraught with nasty personalities and politics. There are competing versions, and the next-generation version probably won't be called RSS. But it's changing the world, and it's based on XML, and it's coming from a direction that nobody's looking in. Stand by.