I wrote:
> Not really, it just introduces the concepts to a new generation of users
> who will in turn be replaced by ones that find it all to complex and
> start again.

You can actually see this happening in the Wikipaedia source format.
Although it borrows some elements from HTML, a lot of it is similar 
in capability to early HTML, but with a much less verbose markup.

It shares the same presentational/structural ambiguity of early 
HTML.  It has italic and bold rather than strong, but has quite
strong structure in terms of headings and lists.

It also shares with the original HTML the lack of font face, colour
and size markup.

It seems to me that the people worrying about RDF and news-clippings
ought to be worrying about the fact that a significant new source of
web content is not even using an XML or SGML language for their markup,
even though that markup is of the sort that HTML is designed for 
(strong on structure, low on presentation).