If you were to narrow down highlights of what web standards mean to the web and or someone wanting to get their site up to standards, what would these be in your opinion?

Faster loading pages
Cross browser compatibility
Easier, quicker and often cheaper to make site wide updates

... to name three of them!

I guess this pretty much wraps it up.

http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/#p31

Yep - even if you don't care much about web standards and those ideals, it's still practical as page loads are faster and importantly, updates/redesigns can be made more easily.

Here's a good article: "A Business Case for Web Standards Based Development"
http://navigationarts.com/insight/we...s/default.aspx

This bears repeating

Originally Posted by blue-dreamer

Easier, quicker and often cheaper to make site wide updates

Emphasis added. Duh. I can't tell you how difficult it is to go muck around with a bunch of html. But I can tell you the salary for doing that is pretty nice, and I work for a company that does consulting so it's salary plus company profit. Plus getting up to speed and just understanding how the layout works currently.

If it's tables and rowspan and colspan and bad or no CSS usage it's going to cost twice as much. And that's on top of what's already unreasonable.

You just can't exaggerate how important this is. And that's just one point, there are other reasons too.

I had to have a look through some messy HTML last night - it was dreadful. I tried to add a little CSS into it and cut out some of the junk but it was completely messy (this wasn't my site, it was a customers). Thankfully I got the job done, but I didn't enjoy that. External style sheets and standards compliant XHTML is a dream compared to that!

Whym, in those cases it's usually easier to just strip out the messy code, keep the content and rebuild with css. I've tried it both ways.. trying to monkey with messy tables is just too time consuming.

If I had more time and it was completely up to me, I would have thrown out the trash and restarted. Sadly, that wasn't what I was asked to do - I was simply asked to make a Google search box and paypal buttons move inline with each other and leave the rest of the code alone

Lol... I dread the first look when editing an unknown site