You wrote: "...as the powers that be removed time and replaced it with data."

To be crystal clear, it wasn't "...the powers that be...", but rather Ian Hickson, dictator for life at WHATWG who made this unilateral decision, which is proving to be extremely unpopular. While hixie's move has had a short term impact on the W3C draft spec, there are serious moves afoot within the W3C to revert this back, and soon. We will likely be successful at the W3C, as that organization has a consensus based process, and clearly there is no consensus here. What happens at WHATWG of course is that hixie has final say, so he may or may not change this decision.

This simply goes to show why the WHATWG non-process of 1 author calling all the shots is fundamentally flawed when it comes to such an important community resource like the Web.

Thanks John.

Yes, I agree that it shouldn't be one person. That's exactly why I think we should be leaning harder on the likes of microformats to generate the data on which decisions can be made. More science!

And I think that's a momentum that should be gained on either side - the mf community should be pushing their specs further, perhaps suggesting where and how they should be represented in HTML.

The data element was just a timely, pardon the pun, example of things going wrong.