I am personally most excited about the <font> tag finally going away. I hated that thing – and the constant explanation of it to my students. Explain it, then explain why not to use it.

– This is useful, just as XHTML 2.0 appears to still include the (navigation list) element.

, – Why do we need these? XHTML 2.0 will have and elements. They aren’t necessarily used for just text.

– It has been deprecated since HTML 4.0. XHTML 1.0 allowed for Strict, Transitional and Frameset only for compatibility with older HTML. With XHTML 1.1, that will be gone, just as it will be with HTML5, so really it isn’t the WHATWG’s idea to drop the tag.

– Yes, I think the death of the tag is a good thing. Why? Well, for one thing, any element can include an image using the @src attribute. In fact, the W3C addresses this change in http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/introduction.html#s_intro_differences

, – encompasses both though. It makes more sense to have one element that does that. Not only that, but if and are provided, where are and and and the others? works for them all. It was meant to be a multi-purpose element where things like didn’t fit. After all, is only for images.

and its special types – This is what scripts are for – validation of user input. This doesn’t belong in HTML. That’s all I’ll say about it.

contenteditable – This is actually a pretty good idea. The W3C already halfway does it with their Amaya browser/editor, and Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar add-in has an Edit HTML and Edit CSS feature that gets us halfway there.

@required – It could be useful in some cases, but generally, there is an acceptance of the asterisk next to a form field denoting a required input. One might even mark it up as * for screen readers that read the title instead of the text enclosed by the start and end tags. For that reason, I’d say this isn’t very necessary.

, – I thought things like this are what and CSS were for. And in the case of XHTML 2.0, they aren’t very necessary anyway with the ability to use @src on any element, and then using CSS for a caption.

Open development process – isn’t this one reason why the W3C’s mailing lists were created, to hash out the various redundancies and useful, yet improperly defined/described, aspects of the languages they govern?

I’m not saying that WHATWG’s HTML5 is bad, but I would rather have something with more semantics, like XHTML. Not only that, but XHTML 2.0 will be able to integrate with other XML-based languages because it is XML itself. In fact, that can be done now with the Modularization of XHTML. I do hope that HTML5 does become somewhat popular, so that the efforts of those who worked on it won’t be wasted.

As for WordPress, I have my doubts. Everything that has ever been said within WP is that they’ll support XHTML as it’s newer and therefore better.

It will be fun to see what the WordPress community comes up with newer standards like HTML and maybe put together a plugin or two myself.