Support for XHTML5

Greetings All,

 Just by way of very brief intro, I edit a born-digital journal "ISAW
Papers" that covers topics in ancient history, archaeology, language and
related fields [1].

 ISAW Papers uses XHTML5+RDFa as the base format for articles. Right now
our public facing versions are idiosyncratic [2], but those are rendered
from much cleaner markup. A major difference is that the archival version
has no javascript. But I digress

 I of course welcome the development of a W3C standard for Scholarly HTML.
For existing publications such as ISAW Papers support for the XHTML
concrete syntax[3] of the abstract HTML language is important.

 I definitely recognize that this is one of "those topics" that can start a
flame war. Or perhaps be initially brushed off by, "Sorry. Too late." I'm
assuming the latter won't happen at this early stage and I hope we can
avoid the former.

 For me the need for XHTML is practical. I'm looking for a robust, widely
recognized standard that can serve the end-to-end goals of scholarly
publication that include straightforward creation, open source tools for
our editorial work-flow, accessible publication in the immediate and medium
term, and long-term archival storage and the expectation of readability far
into the future.

 As in, I use a lot of XSLT and I want rigorous validation;  I look to
align with epub[4] and other efforts; etc.

 I've only just begun to look at the SH standard so can't confidently say
something like, "This won't be too hard." I suspect that there actually are
some difficult issues involved.

 Perhaps some easy approaches are at the policy level:

 The group can endorse XHTML5 as a concrete syntax of Scholarly HTML. This
by way of parallel to the 5.1 standard.

 To the extent there is a test-suite, that can be maintained in XHTML5 as
well.

 The language of SHOULD, CAN, etc. can be used to guide practitioners away
from patterns that are difficult to implement in either syntax. Or at least
point out where the issues lie.

 Again, the above is only initial reactions to what looks to be an
important initiative that may well have a practical impact on what I do. I
look forward to reactions.

 -Sebastian

[1] ISSN 2164-1471 <http://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/isaw-papers>
[2] http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/9/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/introduction.html#html-vs-xhtml
[4] http://www.idpf.org/epub/301/spec/epub-contentdocs.html#sec-xhtml