Totaly agreeing with what is said in your news.
I also agree with the w3c validator but I actualy use this in case I forgot to close a tag or something like that which could cause some issue with some navigator (to not mention IE) and works quite well in some other (well , all the rest).

Applet , yeah , the web isn’t the good place for it , personaly I hate flash and do not use flash for few simple reasons :
-Google (don’t know if it’s still true) don’t know what the hell is flash, so my bad, you are bad ranked on google.
-You realy need to put my cpu to 10% for a supid advertissement or freez my screen ?

Ps : Thanks for the firefox plugin , I didn’t knew about it and I will use it.
Why registration ? kinda simple , because they give the information to some commercial or some other website to make extra $$ (even if you checked the box “do not receive ads for our partner” , who will know it was gaven from them anyway ?).