Ian Hickson (emphasis added):
Someone whom I can’t identify publicly, since he posted only on one of the secret W3C member lists, contributed to the following thread […]
Net result: the latest publication of HTML5 is now blocked by Adobe, via an objection that has still not been made public […]
Secret W3C member lists? Anonymous holds? What is this, the Senate?
Some might say this is Adobe’s fault.
Hey, look, it’s a new W3C site.
Hm:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Ooh, XHTML…
$ curl -sI http://beta.w3.org/ | grep 'Content-Type'
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Heh.
In the world of grammarians there are two competing camps: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Edward Finegan of the University of Southern California sums up the difference:
Descriptive grammarians ask the question, “What is English (or another language) like – what are its forms and how do they function in various situations?” By contrast, prescriptive grammarians ask “What should English be like – what forms should people use and what functions should they serve?”
In the prescriptivist camp falls Lynne Truss, The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, and your high school English teacher. Prescriptivists aim to help us use the English language properly. The intention is noble: if we all speak the same language, we can communicate much more effectively. But it’s a bit Quixotic: if language was static, we’d all still write like Chaucer.