I made the experience when I suggested a new set of form elements, that I did not get much response on those contributions. The same might happen to your suggestions, as they are on a more basic level, than the HTML5 works act on. I don't think you can blame the people working on HTML5 for this, as they are quite far in the process, and your suggestions do rather set new starting points, than contribute to the acutal state of the work.
This I understand, and I can even sympathise with it. However, I do hope that at least "they" will take this issue seriously and at least try to build in something that will enable "us" to work on that part of the spec independantly later on. I still think that the semantic part has very, very little to do with the technical side of the spec. so somewhere the two should be able to split up. Just to give you a comparative example: what if wordprocessor manufacturers were to start writing a spec that enabled them to standardise their native document format. Would you agree to the premise that that would mean that they had to take control of dictionaries and grammer? I don't want to imply that this is what happening here, but like you said, historically the two have been interlinked with each other in HTML, but IMO the time has come to AT LEAST THINK about the possiblity that they shouldn't.
Bert
