Jeni's Musings

I pretty much agree. This is why HTML5 is being designed as evolutions of HTML4 rather than a big overhaul (indeed, we keep punting things that people suggest to HTML6 or beyond, to avoid succumbing to too serious feature-creep).

I don’t think anyone wants to eliminate RDFa, eRDF, Microformats, ruby, <marquee>, <blink>, or any number of other extensions to HTML. Some of them (e.g. the drag and drop model Microsoft invented for IE) eventually get adopted as core parts of the language, others (e.g. <ruby>) get simplified, adapted and included, yet others (<marquee>, <blink>) get replaced by features in other languages (e.g. CSS).

BTW HTML has a number of extension mechanisms, for details please see the FAQ entry on extensions in HTML5.

HTML6, 7, 8 will continue extending HTML in the directions we need.