1. As much as I love strict HTML4.1-compliant pages with CSS to do the formatting, you'll probably have to go with the masses here. Lots of people are (for whatever reason, legitimate or not) using browsers incapable of handling standards released several years before the end of the last millennium. Some might argue that this is the chicken-and-the-egg thing. Without a reason to clammor for support of these standards, they'll never be supported. Whenever I'm writing something (non-work-related, obviously), I do tend to push things into CSS-land, but I will add a trivial tag or two here and there (thus making my HTML "transitional" rather than "strict") to at least make it look "OK" in non-CSS browsers. They will never look nearly as good though, and I think that's OK. It's just enough of an incentive.

If it's just a vote you're looking for, I vote for CSS.

2. I still don't understand the anti-cookieism attitude. Most browsers have options such as "accept cookie only from originating site" and I think Mozilla even has a mechanism to accept cookies only from certain hosts. If you want to give into the evil tracking paranoia (which I will admit isn't 100% unfounded), you do have options here. Non-mandatory cookies seems like a nice compromise. If people want to live without them, they just won't see those nifty features. I think that's fine. Everyone is happy that way.