Hello,
But after all the time the web design community has spent trying to get us to deal in semantics, rather than presentation, it seems pretty ironic to me that we see such a pressure to do precisely the opposite...
Just a minor note: I think semantics vs presentation is a false dichotomy. That drill was about structure vs presentation.
For those of us who are interested in semantics, the visual editor and its DOM+microdata scheme is really good news! I refer here to the fact that formatting info is mixed with semantic(-like) markup in wikitext. In html for example you could use GRDDL (I haven't ever seen it in application), RDFa, microformats and now microdata. They all can give you a layer for semantic annotations that is separable from the structural information. A heaven for robots collecting semantic info. So semantics is exactly why the current parser/editor plans are so exciting. I know tat they are doing it because of a tendency that the old interface is failing to attract some otherwise capable new editors. But I think there will be a huge collateral profit for the projects dealing with semantics.
Best Mihály