> I agree with you, but also I think the section tag is one of the biggest leaps forward we've had. Putting an id on a whole section instead of a name= crap for references, and actually using nesting for hierarchy.

How does this differ from how <div> was being used before?

I've switched to using <section> simply because it's a better name, but I'm not sure it's made any meaningful difference in my code.

Another example of the pointlessness of this issue is <em> and <strong>. I've rarely seen code where these weren't used exactly the same as <i> and <b> were before. In rare cases, I've seen someone do something like make <em> a different color rather than italic, and that's almost always been a bad idea, because when HTML authors use <em> they almost always intend for it to be italic. In fact, I'd say we should just continue using <i> and <b> because those communicate intent better, but at this point I've worked in too many codebases that decided that <i> could be hacked to mean "icon" (i.e. using FontAwesome) which is a horrible, awful, no-good, bad, hack.

> All the HTML5 input types are also an example of semantics impriving. It could be way better, but it's not a total stalemate

That's true, but I think we'd be moving forward a lot more quickly if we weren't devoting most of standards development resources toward giving companies more fine-grained control of our browsers through CSS/JS.

My e-book reader shows <em> text with teal color and I like it, it's better visible than italic and the font remains upright and readable, I doubt it will be comfortable to read lots of text in italic. I didn't notice any discrepancy with <i>. But for some reason <strong> doesn't override <em> and they multiply, though I saw it used once when an exclamation was repeated several times with increasing emphasis for extra dramatism.