Should interfaces be intelligent?

No. Regardless of whether you are an office professional, information professional, or executive, your software should give sufficient feedback and provide suggestions. It should leave the decisions to you and above all, the procedures should be accessible and understandable rather than "magical".

Will XML and other standards change the web?

Yes and no. XML is primarily a "bug fix" to SGML which allows documents to be parsed without concrete knowledge of their syntax and semantics (the so-called "DTD"). This allows for safer and less error-prone automated processing. In fact, XML is likely to reduce the amount of software that employs DTDs in favour of systems that merely look at the so-called "name spaces".

One cannot assume that XML, RDF and Dublin Core will convince information producers on the internet to provide properly classified and enriched information.