I am also a fan of "bottom up" website design, although my days of working on code are fading into the past. I remember when CSS was the next big thing. I like neat code, and while I may not write my code in the conventional manner, I hope that my work is easy to follow and to understand.

While I am completely supportive of your desire to ensure that your work is standards compliant and accessible, there will always be a case where your best efforts will fail. For example, there is not certainty that a screen reader will understand anything that you refer to in JavaScript.

Having been involved in the development of a complex web app, I have seen that it is really easy for the decision makers to enforce a speed to market preference over a standards compliance. In an ideal world, it would not take additional resource to design, build or test perfect HTML, but it does. I respect the work that you have done and the choice in tools that you have made, but how much less time would you have spent on your projects if you just focused on making them work correctly in Internet Explorer for Windows (or Safari for Mac)? They wouldn't work as you'd like on other platforms, but they might just work enough.

I certainly hope that you are able to stick to your guns on this matter, but please don't get too frustrated if you are working to a externally imposed timeline and they want the job done to show their immediate client.

The real issue as I see it is that User Agents accept broken code and different agents react to the same code in different ways. Look at the IE/Mozilla CSS thing. I think that there should be more pressure on Browser developers to construct truly standards compliant UAs. I've read part of the W3C HTML specs and it didn't appear ambigous to me. Lets face it, everyone has IE of some flavour - either to use as their main browser or to test for the "great unwashed" who do. Once IE demands standard compliance, then the web will be the Utopia that socially aware developers crave. Or at least if they handle HTML and CSS markup as per the W3C specs, then that'd be a huge start.