XML 2.0!
No, version 2.0 of the xml standard has not been released (well, 1.0 update 5 tries to do something similar but that's another sad sad story...). However, Norm Walsh has some insightful and interesting musings on the subject here. I like to read Norm's suggestion in general, given his sensible and pragmatic approaches. It certainly beats reading through streams of nonsense at mailing lists like xml-dev. Granted, chances for getting xml version 2.0 (or, any sensible improvement beyond 1.0, it seems) can be estimated to be in the range between slim and none. But without good suggestions and proposals, chances are even weaker.