Should Online Course Design Meet Accessibility Standards?

For quite some time now, the Internet and its content have been developing in a haphazard way. This is not inherently a bad thing and perhaps it's even unavoidable, but it does have its problems. Web-based languages such as HTML, JavaScript, XHTML, XML, Perl, etc have been standardized into versions, but these standards shift over time because these languages are almost all very new and in many cases, current online content does not conform to them anyway as long as browsers continue to interpret bad or proprietary code in the way that designers want. Thus it has come to pass that a considerable amount of current online content "works" because browsers display what we want them to display, but the code underneath that creates that display is irregular, inconsistent, often idiosyncratic, and in many cases, produced according to the biases of the vendor. Moreover, interface design itself has tended to operate on conventions (unconsciously accepted practices) rather than standards (methodically crafted and tested practices). Frames for example, were used extensively up until a few years ago when they fell into disrepute. The convenience of having a standard omni-present navigational panel was eventually outweighed by the fact that neophytes were unable to bookmark anything except the frameset file (the splash page of the website).