> I agree with you, but also I think the section tag is one of the biggest leaps forward we've had. Putting an id on a whole section instead of a name= crap for references, and actually using nesting for hierarchy.

How does this differ from how <div> was being used before?

I've switched to using <section> simply because it's a better name, but I'm not sure it's made any meaningful difference in my code.

> All the HTML5 input types are also an example of semantics impriving. It could be way better, but it's not a total stalemate

That's true, but I think we'd be moving forward a lot more quickly if we weren't devoting most of standards development resources toward giving companies more fine-grained control of our browsers through CSS/JS.

My e-book reader shows <em> text with teal color and I like it, it's better visible than italic and the font remains upright and readable, I doubt it will be comfortable to read lots of text in italic. I didn't notice any discrepancy with <i>. But for some reason <strong> doesn't override <em> and they multiply, though I saw it used once when an exclamation was repeated several times with increasing emphasis for extra dramatism.