Great history of HTML 5 by Mark Pilgrim in this link: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html Amongst other things this details is the great fail of XHTML and how often people went to great lengths to try to convert their sites to pure XHTML, only to specify the mime type as text/html so it wouldn't break. Also, how the W3C decided it didn't want to take on extending HTML 4 with new declarative mark-up, so a sub-group of enthusiasts broke off and took the task on themselves, with step one being to figure out just exactly how all the different browsers were coded to be forgiving of broken markup. Every browser did it differently with the same intent, but once this Rosetta stone was parsed it was possible to move on to new features that wouldn't break backward compatibility.
Reading this took me on a little side trip into Xforms and the history of that largely unimplemented technology. Clearly, the browser as OS is the future, but how competing browser developers can agree upon accepted and universal standards so that mark-up doesn't have to be tweaked for every user agent and conceivable device, and still maintain a market edge is the challenge. As long as the ubiquitous web remains a jungle of sniffing and changing code to make mark-up work behind the scenes, there will be chaos.
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