XML promises to be the Alexandria (I won't say Xanadu) of our digital desert dreams. It will let us build great libraries simply by building our own sites. It will let the average person put together very sophisticated and powerful applications, simply by tagging everything properly so it fits into the larger schema of the Web. Style sheets and the OBJECT model will provide the layout capabilities to make it look good. Then, in that future, we will have databases only to do what databases do best: Search for and compare 283 possible ways to get from San Francisco to Denver on July 3 for the lowest fare, find the best combination of 40,000 products for a particular visitor, or to do banking transactions. In this future scenario, Web sites will be big, flat, and tagged full of standard-compliant meta-data descriptions. Then the webmaster will tend, or farm, this flat Web site, using automated content-management tools to help keep it all up to date. Meanwhile, the search engines will grow more powerful every day and the average site builder will be able to participate. Radical, yes. You decide who is extreme.--The Web is Ruined and I Ruined it, April 11, 1997