I get the spirit of the article, but disagree with some of the specifics.

> HTML remains hostile to beginners.

What? HTML is dirt simple. There are some fiddly bits, but if you are creating simple documents (like this one) you don't need them — just use the subset of HTML that you are comfortable with.

> HTML is generally unkind to people of limited hearing, vision, etc.

Only if you mess it up. Clean and simple markup is usually pretty accessible.

But really, this page is 1.4 MB of code for less than 20 KB of text (300 ms to load!). You want the 'cheap' and simple web, then set an example.