These are my impressions after visiting the XML Europe conference last week in London:

• RDF is still alive, but only used as describing metadata. Hardly any fancy logics stuff going on, but this still results in interesting applications.
• XSLT 2.0 is a huge improvement, and is probably going to be one of my favorite programming languages. The specialists couldn't agree how the new strict typing will affect XSLT, but at least it allowes for big optimization improvements.
• SVG 1.2 is absolutely the coolest. The XML format for SVG makes it the obvious Flash killer. But it might even replace HTML too. Text Wrapping was missing from previous SVG version to make HTML-like layout. And Rendering Arbitrary XML is the feature that'll make the transition easier, and much more interesting. This feature is similar to the vendor-specific "behavior" feature in HTML. (HTC in IE, XBL in Mozilla) We were also shown a demo with video, which was running beneath a semi transparent overlay, all in real-time.

And all these technologies are the most powerful when they are combined. F.e. generating sing along music sheets, which is really amazing.