MIT is committed to providing equal access to web based information in accordance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. This ensures that MIT web pages will be readable by users with disabilities.
This may sound daunting, but the good news is that designing accessible web pages means concentrating on the content of your web documents by adhering to present HTML standards and using the HTML language as it was intended, to structure the information, not to control the presentation. This generally means simpler, easier to build web pages. This is not to say that you can't design attractive pages, just that the content should always be your first priority
What about the future of HTML? If it's replaced by some other language will you need to rewrite all of your web pages? If you create your pages with standard HTML you should not need to rewrite because converter applications could accurately convert your pages to the new language.