I'd like to pass over any political overtones
in either Tim BL's original message or Henri S's
reply and focus purely on technical issues :

Henri Sivonen wrote:

> Does the W3C now accept that HTML is not in practice an  
> application of SGML? 

Why do you believe this to be important, Henri ?

> Does the W3C now subscribe to the view that the  
> engines that matter the most are Gecko, Presto, Trident and WebKit  
> and if they interoperate, their common behavior is what gets specified?

Is Internet Explorer based on any of these engines ?  If
not, then the list needs to include IE's underlying engine.

In addition, if the role of the W3C is simply to to place
its seal of approval on what /is/, rather than on what
/should be/, then I for one would find that a very
disturbing (not to say depressing) state of affairs.

Philip Taylor