The end for XHTML?

Tim Berners-Lee just dropped a bomb.

It’s hard to see this as anything but the W3C caving to pressure from WHAT WG. There has obviously been tension between the XHTML2 and HTML5 camps, but they occupied seperate niches; HTML5 was about application interfaces and XHTML2 was about hypertext documents.

Given (a.) the current backlash against XHTML, (b.) the popularity of web applications (and (c.) my eternal pessimism), I suspect that hypertext documents will get the short end of the stick. Along with everyone who hates the idea of a Web of walled gardens.

I don’t like the sounds of this. Should be interesting to watch, I guess.

Update: Aristotle Pagaltzis says exactly what I’m thinking.