It's funny that you mention XHTML 2, because I think it demonstrates the opposite of what you are arguing. XHTML 2 is a lot more like what PHK is proposing: an

It's funny that you mention XHTML 2, because I think it demonstrates the opposite of what you are arguing. XHTML 2 is a lot more like what PHK is proposing: an attempt to "rethink" HTML, come up with something simpler, revolutionary rather than evolutionary, "The Right Thing." It was an attempt to reinvent the space from first principles, and had lots of ideas that were theoretically good but unproven at large scale. When that went nowhere, the world settled on HTML5: evolutionary, incremental, and based on standardizing existing practice. Much less sexy, but more useful in practice. There is a time and a place for bold new ideas, but a standards body designing v2 of a protocol isn't it. Standards are for codifying proven ideas. When standards bodies try to innovate you end up with XHTML, VRML, P3P, SPARQL, etc.