Step one should be valid semantic HTML 4.01 (or equivalently, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html). That's still the current standard, and was carefully designed to b

Step one should be valid semantic HTML 4.01 (or equivalently, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html). That's still the current standard, and was carefully designed to be at least accessible on every browser we've ever had. Step two is adding CSS and JS to make the experience nicer for browsers on which it's switched on and known to work reliably. It seems to me that a lot of devs complaining about IE6 have a grudge because it reveals they routinely skip step one. They had every opportunity to build something that always works and always will and then make all the shiny variations they can handle, but they prefer the "this page optimized for arguing with customers" approach.