I was reading Mark Pilgrim's ariticle entitled The Vanishing Image: XHTML 2 Migration Issues and stumbled on the following comment

You (the author of this article) have a valid point when you say people will want to upgrade to XHTML 2, against the HTML Working Group's expectation/intention. From the tone of this article, one would assume you find this a bad development; I however disagree: I think people should update their website to comply with the latest standards. Authors will have to rewrite their pages into XHTML 2.0, but, with server-side scripting and CSS in mind, this should be a not so very difficult task.

I'm always surprised when I see web design geeks advocating the latest and greatest standards with no indication of what the real benefits are besides the fact that they can place meaningless badges such as   on their website. Technology standards are a means to an end not an end in themselves. The purpose of having well specified technology standards is to guarantee interoperability between software and hardware produced by different vendors. In the case of XHTML, many who have looked at the situation objectively have failed to find any reasons why one should migrate to XHTML 1.0 from HTML 4.01. Arguing that people should migrate to a version of XHTML that isn't even backwards compatible with HTML seems highly illogical since it runs counter to the entire point of standardizing on a markup language in the first place, interoperability.