g1smd - 1:03 pm on Nov 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

Several things will happen...

People will use neither of the standards, and continue to write broken code that conforms to no known standards of any sort (or will manually edit and break code produced by a tool that did originally provide compliant code).

Leading/popular tools will default to one or the other and people will produce code using one or other of the standards, without even realising they had a choice, or what the alternatives actually were.

I see lots of people producing XHTML-like code when HTML 4.01 Transitional would have been more than good enough: and many have no idea that there was an alternative.

The web will continue to be broken unless browsers get more active in alerting users to code errors. IF XHTML2 breaks all previous standards, this could be a good time to make it more strict in application; will it be more strict in not processing files if they are not compliant?