So I was rambling on about document structure and how important CSS is, and my new client inquisitively asks me "WHY?"
And I stumbled...
Since an early age everyone knew I would be a proponent of standards, it was inevitable. But why is CSS and XHTML such a darn big deal? (And how do you explain this to a children's book illustrator?)
The answers are:
1) By separating the content (words and pictures) from the presentation (font, color, size, placement of the content elements) we make it easier to make design changes consistently across the whole site. This is perhaps best exemplified by a site which has kept my attention for hours over the past week, the CSS Zen Garden.
2) This separation is important to make the web accessible to everyone. Usually here there is an arguement for making content accessible to persons with sight imparement, who use browsers that read aloud to them. I think in fact that most webmasters are looking for a different business side effect of making the pages accessible to some other "readers".
Ok, next time my client asks, I'll be ready.