Just few lines to better outline the policy wich I want to follow in maintaining this site (when I remember to do it... I'm editing this lines in my first update in more than five years - what follows seems to be still true though).
As I said, I believe that a web page should be first of all efficient, but most of the the sites around seem to be trying to impress the viewer with their cool design rather than to give him the information he's looking for.
"There are a lot of pages that are bigger than 200 kilobytes (wich means almost 30 seconds of download on an average internet connection), because the designer filled them with animated gifs, java applets and active-X objects to make them look good." I wrote this six years ago, and while the technology and the connection speed have greatly improved since, the underlying concept is still true: look at how sleek the web page of my employer looks and feels compared to some of the competition... (ok, the refernce to www.google.com is a bit biased).
Anyway the fact that those page are big and slow it's not the worst thing: what's really upsetting is that to view those "cool" page you usually need the latest browser, with the latest plugins. Thus cutting off from those sites all the people who can't afford the hardware to run huge and useless apps (or simply don't want to run them), and all those who need to surf in text mode.
Avoiding this is quite simple: it's just a matter of following the rules. No proprietary html extensions: standard HTML is more than enough for every ordinary task. No applets if not needed. Always keep in mind that a page should be viewable both in text and in graphical mode.
Why did I choose Lynx as a test platform for my page? Simply because if a page is viewable in it it's viewable almost anywhere. If I'm using graphical extensions, I'll check them on Mozilla or another gui browser, but I'll check them in Lynx too, to make sure that they not corrupt the HTML source and stop it from working in text mode (although it shouldn't happen as long as standard extensions are used).
I know that my site is not such an interesting thing (and if you've actually read my rant so far I'm quite surprised with your patience), and my implementing this policy won't affect general fashions in anyway, but I still like to think of it as of my little contribution to the accessibility and freedom of use of the world wide web.