There seems to be quite some excitement around Ram Ruby's Roadmap. At first I was a little skeptical on the project (why not calling it YASF as in Yet Another Syndication Format?). After reading Tim Bray's why we need a new format at all I think that it's worth a try.

Recent history tells us that the main divide was between people saying "It has to be powerful and thus not necessarily easy to understand, we will build tools to manage the complexity" and others saying "It has to be simple so that anybody will be able to hack new solutions using it without being an expert".

Both positions make sense. You don't really need to understand how the jpeg format works to create cool images, but at the same time all of us learned html looking at other people's pages, because it was relatively easy to understand.

Ultimately it's only a matter of a very little number of tools vendors, most of them small companies, agreeing on a new standard and changing the world.