I don't actually disagree with most of what Steph says,
however I would mention that what with all the fuss being made over the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA that it was pointed out that when you think about DNA as a "program" it is the biggest and baddest piece of spaghetti-code ever written. I am concerned that the W3C is spending so much of its time defining what the meaning of the wordisis, although the HTML related activities are nowhere as guilty as some of the others. I have no problem with sitting down and ironing out the semantics needed to do, say, credit card transactions but that is simply not the same thing as describing how a person relates to the world. You could map the former on to the latter, sure. But then you might as climb the mountain and tell the world "I am the One True God. All others are second to Me. Don't even try and look back, motherfucker!". And hey, there are still some people who are seriously into that kind of thing but I like to think that most of us prefer a little moderation even if it is for monks. I would much rather see the W3C keep working on the plumbing rather than, to keep these bad quasi-religious analogies going, spending so much time divining water. A good example is the addition of XInclude to XHTML 2.0. When everyone finally finishes complaining about lines, objects and all the rest of the window-dressing, the ability to do server-side includes on the client-side (this is where the REST people are going to trounce the RPC/SOAP weenies) is what people will embrace in the new spec.