I realize that most people aren’t interested in the minute details, so I’ll try and keep this broad. In the beginning of the web there was HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), that is HTML is the language that all web pages were written in.

HTML did pretty well for itself, with every web page published between 1990 and the early 2000s being written in HTML. But HTML does have limitations and problems when it comes to creating modern websites. Originally HTML was only intended for sharing scientific data, and obviously modern graphic and interactivity heavy web sites are a long way from simply formatted scientific papers. To get to the point where web design is today many imaginative people have pulled, poked and stretched HTML to get it to do things it was never meant for.

Now comes XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), these are the ’standards’ this post is about. For those interested in such things, these are fascinating developments. For the other 99.8% of the world here’s a quick primer. One of the major problems with HTML documents is that the content is mixed in with the code that controls the presentation of the content. That isn’t true for XHTML and CSS, where the XHTML part of a site is the actual content (basically the text of the site) and CSS takes care of describing how it should be presented in your browser (’this type of heading should be dark grey and size 8′).

A great visual demo of what XHTML and CSS can do together is CSS Zen Garden. At Zen Garden you see one set of content, a single XHTML file, displayed in an amazing variety of styles, different CSS documents.

The reasons that separating the content from the visual directions for a web site are beneficial are many and complex. One of the most important is that this separation allows for the information in a website to be displayed in different ways without breaking, say on a cellphone browser or some other device.

Here’s what I think the important point is for the non-web technical to take away from this. People who know an awful lot more about these things than I do agree that following web standards is a good idea. So perhaps whether or not a web designer takes XHTML and CSS seriously can be seen as an indicator of how much that designer cares about making websites that work as well possible for as many people as possible.