I cut my web design teeth, at college, early in the standards movement before it was in full swing and as such I have experience of using things like table based layouts, framesets and font tags. I don’t regret this though. In fact, I see it very much as an advantage. I have seen both sides of the coin and because I had this experience I got a real sense of just how important modern web standards are.

With that in mind I would advise people just getting into the industry to build a few practice sites the old way. Use crap code. Use tables and framesets. Use WYSIWYG editors in design view *shudders*. That way you’ll have hands on experience of the benefits of web standards and you can draw on that experience when progressing in the industry.

I’ve noticed that this article doesn’t really state very clearly what is covered in the next one. I’ll add a bit more description now.

This was a pretty simple introduction to web standards however it didn’t touch on the benefits of them however it was still good and a great way for a complete beginner to get started. For those who want to know the main benefit of following web standards well it has to be that by building your site according to web standards it will work correctly across all browsers which implement the standards properly.