I'm fascinated by the idea of including semantic markup in Plain Old XHTML pages, and I'm excited by recent developments in this area. But I'm also concerned about the growing discrepancy between the W3C's initiative, namely RDFa, and the more established but conversely less official microformats effort. I think that having competing standards efforts in this area is going to hurt the advancement of so-called small-s semantic Web technologies, which is going to be bad for everyone.
An interesting bit of web history…