  We examine critically the evidence for deviations from next-to-leading order
perturbative DGLAP evolution in HERA data. We briefly review the status of
perturbative small-x resummation and of global determinations of parton
distributions. We show that the geometric scaling properties of HERA data are
consistent with DGLAP evolution, which is also strongly supported by the double
asymptotic scaling properties of the data. However, backward--evolution of
parton distributions into the low x, low Q^2 region does show evidence of
deviations between the observed behaviour and the next-to-leading order
predictions. These deviations cannot be explained by missing
next-to-next-to-leading order perturbative terms, and are consistent with
perturbative small-x resummation.
