Just a thought on the idea about the "mass of users that would contribute little": why do people assume others will never grow, change or that they have a certain fixed "intellectual level" based on one source of articles they chose to read at one point in time?
As far coding horror links go: the main point of posting a link here is to discuss it, and I, personally, would much rather read comments about Atwood's posts here than on his site because I consider the signal to noise ratio in comments here more reasonable. Even if articles from any given source don't get facts right or if they sound like blatant self-promotion with a programmer facade, I feel the insight from the community's comments are still invaluable.
Maybe for garbage collection or some efficiency reason. Walter Bright had a short write up about shared gc and dlls somewhere in the D site. I'm not sure how much of that would apply to Opera, though.
I personally like that they are creating a new implementation. I suppose that understanding the code and having full control over its direction is a big thing for them.
Before anyone adds new requirements, consider these ones: it has to be emailed and in the printout, the columns should look like tabs above the midle area.
In all seriousness, sometimes requirements are inane, pointless and unreasonable and you just have to push back and say it can't be done.
I think CSS detractors tend to obsess over specific points that tables can handle normally, but often leave out real life situations where obsessive alignment is not necessarily the biggest of the problems. Bias (in this case towards css vs tables, as opposed to web dev in general) is an interesting phenomenon.
I agree that users don't care how your site's markup looks like, but there's a second important factor when it comes to finances: developer time.
Maintaining table based layouts for sufficiently complex sites can be quite a time drain. In that sense, I agree with gigawatt that CSS is much easier to deal with.
I noticed that there are shortcuts for Paypal, but I don't see any copy about how secure those transactions are. I'd suggest adding at least some information on the matter, as some people tend to get paranoid about money transactions over wireless.
I see a certain dichotomy when it comes to the times when things go wrong: from an provider's point of view, downtime is an inconvenience because they now have to deal with an angry client, but from a client perspective, it looks more like the provider is irresponsible and incompetent, than a mere inconvenience (especially when there's money or job security on the line for the client party).
Then again, I think being cold and going for the "we apologize for any inconvenience" line can have some advantages over being personal - it implies you are more objective and reliable.
I read an article about a study on behavior and how people are more likely to follow a revolution than actually start one (in the sense of not just talk about it, but do something about it).
Maybe you should lead by example and show what you've done yourself so that others can copy your efforts. Viral points for being clever, altruistic points for going way out of your way.
As far coding horror links go: the main point of posting a link here is to discuss it, and I, personally, would much rather read comments about Atwood's posts here than on his site because I consider the signal to noise ratio in comments here more reasonable. Even if articles from any given source don't get facts right or if they sound like blatant self-promotion with a programmer facade, I feel the insight from the community's comments are still invaluable.