Tim Berners-Lee (aka, inventor of the World Wide Web while at CERN) writes about hitting the HTML reset button for planning the future of HTML.

About time.

I looked at what was going on with XHTML 2.0 and such and wondered, "Gee, anyone actually talking to us regarding if we're interested in implementing all of this wild stuff?" Did they have such hubris in their grand committee making that they'd think whatever they produced would make us rush to start adhering? Or did they see it as something that competitive browsers would naturally implement and have the entire publishing world navigate to XHTML 2.0 because of it's pure intellectual joy?

There was no common sense to it. It showed that the W3C was this shambling monster of standards still grinding out the ideas... that no one was going to implement.

Tim BL notes:

The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.

Imagine that.