Simplifying XML
Don't give up hope, Tim. A simplified/revised XML spec would make some of our lives much easier.
I'm working on a programming language for the web which integrates XML syntax into the language. This is dandy except that there are times when we need to look at the Doctype in order to be able to parse a program. In our language, for example, you can't use until you've indicated a Doctype of XHTML, and until our wee little parser has fetched and parsed that whole mess and made a big table of entities.
Also, DTD doesn't do much for us. The newer models for validating documents (e.g. Relax) fit better with the kind of validity that programming-language people are inclined to think about (namely, "regular trees").
We do integrate XML Namespaces, so having that pulled in probably wouldn't hurt, either.