  The idea of diffractive processes with a hard scale involved, to resolve the
underlying parton dynamics, was published 1985 and experimentally verified
1988. Today hard diffraction is an active research field with high-quality data
and new theoretical models. The trend from Regge-based pomeron models to
QCD-based parton level models has given insights on QCD dynamics involving
perturbative gluon exchange mechanisms, including the predicted BFKL-dynamics,
as well as novel ideas on non-perturbative colour fields and their
interactions. Extrapolations to the LHC include the interesting possibility of
diffractive Higgs production.
