> 
> Not that I can be bothered to start counting them, but I'd submit to  
> you the there is more wealth of knowledge, specialisms, areas of  
> interest, etc which is being conveyed by web sites worldwide that is  

By number of hits or data volume transferred I wuould guess they
are in an a minority compared with e-commerce sites.  Whilst e-commerce
sites are usually very bad examples of good coding practice, they 
generally all have forms and help pages for those forms.  Those forms
normally require user chosen free text input, which should be represented
by a <var> in the help file.

> quite distinct from anything technical requiring these elements.  
> Mathematics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, medicine...all these would  
> also benefit from their own elements to accurately mark up their  
> content, so why is it that computing technology is "built in" to XHTML  
> 2.0 while these others aren't? Just because "you write XHTML 2.0 on a  
> computer"?