Mostly I agree - except that I've long stopped caring about NN4. Personally, I try to design for the "standard denominator", that is, to do all the layout and presentation work in a stylesheet and keep the markup in the content to a minmum. I avoid .*script like the plague.

The initially surprising result of this dogma is that not only do the pages look snazzy in a standards compliant graphical browser, they are actually very readable in Lynx as well because the markup is tidy. So I can have my cake and eat it, too. The markup passes all W3C validators perfectly so if someone's browser has trouble it's broken, period. If someone's system is too limited for a modern graphical browser they can always use Links for a much better experience than NN4 can offer. My pages will work fine with that.

C'mon folks, the HTML4 standard was finalized in '97 and CSS1 isn't much younger. You'd think vendors would have gotten a grip on those over five years later, but no. If we keep writing twisted¹ or outright invalid HTML to cater to software that was broken from the onset, vendors will keep slacking. They would have to shape up sooner or later if webmasters rigorously stuck to the standards. Strict standards compliance on all sides would make life easier for everyone involved - including the dev teams at the vendors who wouldn't have to laborously teach their software how to react sanely to insane input.

You can tell the topic is a pet peeve of mine..

¹ HTML was never meant to be carry layout instructions, after all.

Makeshifts last the longest.