Ryan Parman is cranky and for good reason:
I keep hearing web designers and coders complaining about web standards. Some think that web standards are too hard to follow. Others think that web standards are part of some sort of right-wing international conspiracy to shove the common man out of the world of web design so that they can control the technology and charge people handsomely for newer hardware and software. Others still have never even heard of web standards, and have no idea what CSS positioning is. The rest of us just get it.
Seriously, people lets get on the boat here. Nobody ever made it anywhere in the programming business by writing invalid C++ code. Oh, I’m sure people would love it if you could write syntactically incorrect assembler code. There would be 5 million assembly coders. We’d also be in a big freaking hole and our technology industry would resemble the WWW, mostly unwieldy, mostly crappy, and mostly retarded.
If you are hell-bent on continuing to use tables for layout, font tags, and non-semantic markup, then this is not the industry for you. You need to do your job as a web designer in order to stay in this industry. The future of the web depends on it.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.