IMO also another issue that I see is that often "generality" is used in the form that, for example, most people wouldn't know how to code all of that semantic stuff so it shouldn't be there, why worry about it and we'll just dumb down our ambitions (eg. Flickr users case study and alt attributes may come to mind in HTML 5).

Its a strange argument. Because most people in the end will always code junk from a WYSIWYG, we're the exceptions. Most people wouldn't code in C or Java either. They're just different tools for different purposes. It's just the generality argument comes up so often from proponents of dropping accessibility features because most authors don't do them anyway yada yada...

OK I'm early morning babbling lol. Don't mean to sound like a flame, its an excellent article. I just think seriously that when we stop seeing the computer paradigm as someone sitting on a chair in front of a monitor then we might actually get a liberating computer experience. Or Big Brother lol.

I'd like to think whatever the web is in 10 years time it will be nothing like I imagined it. As opposed to just better HTML for making websites.

But, of course, I may be wrong about many things on a Saturday morning. :)