Standards in a Nutshell
If a picture is worth a thousand words, that means I talk less, and many times that's a good thing. I ran across a simple, rather compelling way of explaining the benefits of semantic markup combined with CSS. It is titled Standards in a Nutshell. See for yourself.
Imagine the three colors as three different programming languages. In the first example, they're all slammed together in one document. In the other, they are neatly separated and grouped in a less random fashion. If you are unfamiliar to web design and scripting, which one looks more organized and maintainable? If you are up to speed, crack open a few sites, which one resembles your website?
It may not have to be perfect like the diagram, but it is much easier to maintain a website when you separate the different languages while bulding it initially. This goes for a simple site all the way up to a wiki or CMS.
