Does anyone here follow this sort of thing?

I caught TBL's announcement last autumn but haven't heard anything since.

When can we get past this horrible, branched mess and start using clean, spare, easy-to-formulate HTML 5 and CSS 3?

At any point in this lifetime?

Heck...
I'm 32, and at the current pace, I don't think I'll be still working in this industry when it will come....

Xhtml is what, 4-5 years old ? And still mostly unused...
If you want something cleaner than html, you could do XML + XSL, but at the end, it's not that much cleaner.
Well, at least it completely breaks if you do an error, and isn't fault tolerant.

Originally Posted by Anna C

Does anyone here follow this sort of thing?

I caught TBL's announcement last autumn but haven't heard anything since.

When can we get past this horrible, branched mess and start using clean, spare, easy-to-formulate HTML 5 and CSS 3?

At any point in this lifetime?

HTML5 has been under rather obscure development for quite some time before the W3C recognised that XHTML is pretty much a lost cause and threw their weight behind the WHATWG.

In my opinion XHTML1.0 (served as text/html, due to IE6+7 intolerances) is not that bad. It offers some level of forward movement. In the meantime if you want to start using XML (proper), such as SVG and MathML, there are ways to do so and offer IE a fall-back. Also, you can develop a framework within which both contemporary methods will work and the next generation of technologies.

It's an exciting time to be a developer, although you certainly do get the feeling things are never going to quite work themselves out.

I'm glad you're following it though.