In reply to Jeff Chandler.

Most of the big wins are at a low-enough level that personal coding preference would have little bearing on the "standard". There are only so many ways that you can create form field markup for a given data type, and only so many ways that you can properly sanitize that data type.

And don't even get me started on Post Formats; I'm still crying over Mark Jaquith ripping my heart out when he pulled out the standard from WordPress 3.6 during beta...