I honestly never understood why html needs to manually specify all these tags, due to the contraints their semantics are as much as lost, just give us some tags with clear and precise semantics list, quote, address, a, input etc, then let us markup the rest with whatever we want.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the author's point, but I thought there was a push to move away from lots of special-case tags like <q>, <dl>, etc. For such a general-purpose SGML, it seems silly to assume that HTML will have a semantically-meaningful tag for the majority of your semantics.<p>Maybe I'm smoking crack, though. :)
I'm hoping this title is literal, as in "smoking crack and being the mayor of DC are not mutually exclusive activities"<p>edit: No, the title is false advertising.