mezzoblue | Made for All of Us:

Accessing any web site on the cell phone I'm cursed with is an exercise in frustration, however I had time one afternoon to make a determined attempt to use various sites. Those built with standards worked. Those built with accessibility in mind worked well. Those built by developers stuck in 1997-era development habits were completely useless.

Solving this problem would mean employing methods to make the site work without CSS, without script, and essentially allow unstyled and unscripted HTML to accomplish the same task. Funny enough, doing so would likely boost the overall accessibility of the site as well, allowing users with assistive devices to accomplish the same goals in a similar fashion.

Simple really. Standards compliance allows or helps other things to happen. Nobody said web standards were glamourous, if you want fame and fortune go be a rock star. If you want to be a web developer - and you want to be good at it - use standards. It won't solve all of your problems and yes, we know, CSS isn't properly supported yet. Again, go be a rock star.

Just because standards support is not yet perfect does not mean we shouldn't use them. Just because there's a learning curve doesn't mean you shouldn't learn it. If you're a developer you obviously know some amount... were you born with that knowledge? No. You learned, there was a learning curve, there is a learning curve for the next level.

Separating style, content/structural presentation, behaviour, application and data layers is a good idea. Websites should work with CSS, images and scripting turned off. Since nobody cares about the accessibility side I'll simply remind everyone that mobile phones and search engines have the same needs. So when your boss uses their Palm Pilot to Google for their own name, you'd better hope you didn't include it on your site by having JavaScript write in an image without an ALT attribute.