web standards project article

Molly E. Holzschlag has an article on http://www.webstandards.org about what
web standards actually are. I found it quite interesting and was hoping to
discuss it further. An excerpt is below:
In HTML and XHTML there is an implication in the specs that working in a
strict environment is the ideal. That using meaningful markup is ideal. But
neither of these are a real or even de facto standard. So semantic markup is
an implied goal, not even a measure of compliance, and something we are
trying still to understand. Semantic markup is a best practice, not an
explicit recommendation.