This is one of the biggest reasons why I think that HTML is still important for general application development. HTML isn't perfect, it could be a lot better.

This is one of the biggest reasons why I think that HTML is still important for general application development. HTML isn't perfect, it could be a lot better. But it goes a long way towards forcing developers to put their interface in pure text, and to do the visual layout afterwards. I think separating content from styling has gone a long way towards improving accessibility, precisely because it makes the accessibility features less invisible. I suspect there are additional gains we could make there, and other ways that HTML could force visual interfaces to be built on top of accessible ones.