A new article by Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman suggests that "99.9% of all websites are obsolete" because they were not created using the most recent Web stadards such as CSS2, HTML 4, and XHTML.

While I'm very supportive of open standards for the Internet, people will switch to 100% XHTML/CSS when it is advantageous to do so and not before. Adaptation of new technology is not driven simply by ideology but by practicalities as well. If there are not clear advantages to XML, XHTML, and CSS over old HTML then people will not use the newer tech.

I have a particular problem: I'm leading a team that is creating a Web site for international development researchers. Our site needs to be compatible not just with the latest Web browsers, but with old (sometimes very old) Web browsers in very many southern countries all around the world. It would actually be silly for us to suggest to someone in rural Kenya using expensive dial-up access to download and upgrade to IE6 so that our pages will be legible to them. Instead, I'm going to use CSS for text formatting (which degrades fine) and tables for layout.