The Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software have together released a Position Paper for the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. It's a must-read. First, it's a real Position Paper. With opinions, directions, ideas. I agree with almost everything in that paper. Sincere congrats to both the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software (I suspect a well-known cross-org person whose nick begins with H and ends with e is behind that document...) for such a great document. But not only for that. Writing and releasing such a document is a proof of courage because the W3C and the industry are full of people infected by the XML-everywhere fever who lost contact with the reality of users' needs. These people represent the Software Industry, with big capital letters; this Industry has invested thousands of man-years into the SGML/XML (or PDF...) technology and they are not ready to see one or two disruptive entrants play in their protected field...

A few things I really like in this paper:

Backwards compatibility, clear migration path
Absolutely. And that's why I think XHTML 2.0 is complete mistake.
binary plug-ins (are) highly unlikely to be successful
That's already proven...
Scripting is here to stay but should be avoided where more convenient declarative markup can be used
Yep. People who think scripting should be forbidden on the Web and that new W3C specs should get rid of scripting are fools.
Device-specific profiling should be avoided
Yeah... Please, not a WAP-like episode again...
HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript
I am so glad to read that, you can't imagine. HTML, 9 occurences. XHTML, 2. The ground for the Future of the Web is the Present of the Web. The Present of the Web is HTML 4. Pretending the contrary, and that leads to XHTML2's lack of backwards compatibility, is just mad.
Richer widget set: the existing HTML controls are quite limited
That was one of the subjects discussed at the Future of HTML Workshop in 1998. We're still here, thanks to the HTML Working Group.
A predefined HTML editor based on the rich text editing architecture.
ah, finally, Opera realizes that an inline rich content editor is useful ?-)
What is needed from schema languages? Nothing.
ROFL!!!!! Thanks so much for having the cojones to write that.

I can't make the trip to attend that workshop, unfortunately. I can't wait to read the minutes and conclusions of the workshop. I think this paper is going to face a fierce resistance...