As Mark Pilgrim reports, the XHTML 2 Draft Spec was released today. It’s a dull thing to read, and so I’ll summarise:
You know all that stuff about accessibility, and the amount of work that decent web developers put into making sure you can read the site in older browsers? Yeah? W3C doesn’t. They’ve deprecated the img tag, lost br, and *anything* is now allowed to have a href tag, and be a link. The first will break every web page ever, the second has some justification (…but until CSS is better implemented screws everyone over…) and the third means they might as well have deprecated the anchor tag as well. The new List Navigation type may be useful from a semantic point of view, and the XML-based XForms (Forms are deprecated in favour of the XForms spec) are going to break all current web forms (Because they return data in XML format. God knows how).
Go read what Mark linked to, but basically I feel that the W3C have, by their stated position of abandoning backwards compatibility in the standard, lost any authority over it they have a right to. It’s just broken
So Aquarionics remains HTML 4 compliant