[nl]

All I see is a normal evolution of things in an R&D context.

Which is fine, except the premature standardization approach used by Semantic Web technologies destroyed any chance they had of working.

HTML5 could emerge because of the wide adoption of XHTML and web standards by developers and designers. Not despite the existence of XHTML. The latter is just heavily colored value attribution on the part of the author.

Actually, no. HTML5 forked from HTML4, not XHTML because the W3C had a different vision.

This isn't the just authors view: I followed the mailing list and it's pretty well understood.

See for example the "A Competing Vision" in https://diveinto.html5doctor.com/past.html