footnotes

After hunting around the W3 archives,
I was unable to determine the current
status of the footnote tag.
I was disturbed to see it is not in the list
of html 4 elements.

i. Is it generally accepted that html should
offer explicit footnote and endnote tags,
both for the structure this offers to html
documents and to facilitate translation
between document formats?

ii. What are the current proposals,
and where are they listed?

iii. If this is not being standardized, how are the
Microsoft and Lotus plans to use XML as the
standard document format going to be
realized?

Thanks,
Alan G. Isaac