The Dream of a New Web
Brendan Eich writes:
Real browser vendors, who have to deal with the ugly web as it is, know better. The dream of a new web, based on XHTML+SVG+SMIL+XForms, is just that — a dream. It won’t come true no matter how many toy implementations (including Mozilla implementations — we’ve supported XHTML for years) there are. Long before the w3c gets compound documents working on paper (having missed the chance with SVG 1.0 and 1.1, which ambiguate and conflict with CSS), XAML etc. will leak onto the public web.
What matters to web content authors is user agent market share. The way to crack that nut is not to encourage a few government and big company “easy marks” to go off on a new de-jure standards bender. That will only add to the mix of formats hiding behind firewalls and threatening to leak onto the Internet.
The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards, with compatibility shims provided for IE, so that web content authors can actually deploy new formats interoperably.
The basic fact is that de-facto standards always win over de-jure standards. I have seen too many current websites that don’t use CSS properly, forget XHTML+SVG+SMIL+XForms.
Until the majority of stakeholders are convinced about the value of a change, it will never happen.