We wanted to make it easier to maintain the site. We no longer wanted to leave users out in the cold, enabling them instead to use the site regardless of their system. And ultimately, we want our users to customize the site to suit their needs. Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Mac will even display it as source code if the mood strikes it. Let's not kid ourselves.
Nothing is completely altruistic.
We all had our reasons, but luckily they all had the benefit of helping out the users. We, as volunteers who maintain evolt.org, got to flex our coding muscles on a project that we feel has a lot of weight in the community. We got to finally test the theory that a site can be built to be compliant, accessible, and attractive, all without those meddling clients. Where we did it Offices, apartments, and houses in Buffalo, Kopavogur, Milwaukee, Portland, Edinburgh, Adelaide, Anchorage, and all the places in between. There is no evolt.org home office, we are distributed as haphazardly as the Internet itself.