Well, this is my first journal posting. It was prompted by the article on /. regarding the benefits of XHTML. More specifically, I was/am really pissed that there are people who would knowingly work against the W3C standards based on some stupid conspiracy theory that W3C is working for Microsoft. I mean, wake up people! Standards are there to make sure Microsoft can't write their own rules and then force everyone to use MS software, not the other way around!
I personally find that XHTML and XML itself are the coolest technologies around! I am in love with how easily you can manipulate XML with XSLT stylesheets. It's changing the way I write web applications!
On a side note, I think that W3C's XHTML2 is a little far-fetched. While I can see it is a powerful language, and I would love to use it, the fact that it is not backwards-compatible will restrict it to intranets and other controlled environments. Until 98% of browsers support it, few businesses will use it (even I wouldn't use it myself for a public website). Besides, XHTML1 promisses to be forward-compatible for as long as XML is around (which hopefully will be a LONG time).
I am not saying it's bad. It's about time we have a re-write of HTML rather than just a cleanup (XHTML just stripped out the presentation markup). I just don't think MS will make IE XHTML2 complient and time until V.10 and until then not many will use it. Too bad :(