Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
A gentleman from the W3C was kind enough to point me to a newly tracked issue for the HTML5 working group related to namespaces in HTML5, entered by James Graham. I’m not a player in this game, because I can continue to use XHTML 1.1 until they pry it out of my cold, dead browser. However, it is good to see some concerted effort in adding SVG and MathML to HTML5, as well as XHTML5. The two are nothing more than serialization formats, and it shouldn’t matter which we use. However, as it stands now, the data model changes based on the serialization, and that’s not a particularly good thing.
In the meantime, XHTML is getting more kicks because of the draconian error handling. Seriously, I’d love to know who coined this term, so we can take them out behind the barn. Whether the comment was facetious or not, Ian Hickson’s statement that the great thing about XML’s well-formedness requirements is that this kind of thing can’t happen, because the author would catch this kind of error straight away, is true. Errors don’t creep in, they trumpet for attention. But, to each their own. I’m not a player in this game.