- Patch #245115 by kkaefer, John Morahan, JohnAlbin et al: after a long discussion we've decided to make the concatenation operator consistent with the other operators.

#208768 by dvessel, Arancaytar: language direction should be in the HTML source, so it is more accessible even without CSS

 - whitespaces at end of lines
 - indentation
 - control structure usage
 - whitespace in empty lines
 - phpdoc comment formatting

#141727 by merlinofchaos, dvessel, sun: restore themeability support for maintenance pages (regression)

#180897 by sun and dvessel: fix various XHTML validity issues in Drupal by closing unclosed tags, avoiding empty table containers, and so on

#164451 by several people: Right to left (RTL) CSS styles for Garland, so Drupal can even be installed in RTL form from the start

- Patch #145218 by profix898, bennybobw, Crell, forngren et al: use href instead of @import for CSS.

 - always include CVS Id tags in all files
 - add a new line after the CVS Id, if more code or phpdoc follows in the same code block
 - fix bogus Id tags previously added

#141725 by Crell and dvessel: allow themes to define multiple CSS and JS files in their .info files, which can be clearly overriden

#127539: progressive operation support, refactoring update.php code to a generic batch API to support runnning operations in multiple HTTP requests
  - update.php is already on the batch API
  - node access rebuilding is in the works
  - automatic locale importing is in the works

 Thanks to Yves Chedemois (yched) for the good code quality, very wide awareness of issues related to batches,
 and the fantastic turnaround times. Hats off.