> overloading classes (which are supposed to carry strictly
> presentational information) and removing the utility of @role for
> accessibility, as well as complicating machine processing of
> semantics.

Whilst I generally share the concern about class and role being
standardisation of non-standardisation, my understanding has never
been that class is about presentation.  I think this is a common
misunderstanding, and people often write about CSS class, but considering
it as presentational will only reinforce the current misuse of
things like class="red".

> The role of a standards body should be to standardize what people are
> already doing, possibly nudging them gently towards more flexible or
> accurate practices. This is not what XHTML 2.0 is doing. XHTML 2.0 is

Again, I agree that has been the traditional role of standards bodies,
although I think I would consider the GSM mobile phone specification
a counter example.  However, there are other places in W3C where I think
they are creating new, rather than standardising, in particular SVG, which
does have the commercial interest that XHTML 2 doesn't have, and therefore
is more likely to have an impact on the world.

> - RELEASE THE SPECIFICATION, warts and all. It will take years for the
> browsers to support it anyway as we've missed the window for IE7

I think that it will never be a priority for mainstream browsers, because
it is not optimised for either advertising or thin client applications.