In response to a relaunch at LockerGnome, Matthew Mullenweg calls for a boycott because the site now uses a table-based, low-CSS, markup soup design:
Think of your poor browser, which has to work incredibly hard to try and interpret what is essentially markup gibberish and shape it into something it can present to you. ...
Sure some people don't care about whatever markup is behind the web pages they visit. Out of site and out of mind, right? (Very apathetic American.) But I care, and it's because of people who care that the web has moved beyond the near-unusable mess it was 5-7 years ago. ...
Lockergnome regressing from the standards-based is more than just a bad business decision, it is essentially giving the middle finger to the community around the world that cares about these things.
I'll concede that the Gnome is homely, but aside from accessibility issues, no one should care how pure your markup is. Millions of Web sites use sloppily coded HTML, layout tables, and other things that would make a style-conscious designer or HTML validator queasy. One more won't break the Web.