Benefits of Web Standards

In the 90's Microsoft and Netscape battled for adoption of their respective browsers. Sometimes they enticed developers and users with HTML tags that were unique to their browser. These tags provided additional functionality (e.g. Internet Explorer's visual filters) but the cost is the absense of such functionality to people using other browsers and platforms.

Today things have improved. In general browser companies are implementing the standards laid out by the W3C. This allows web developers write code that will generally appear the same way irrespective of the browser or platform that the user is on. This takes discipline and knowledge, but there are tools to help.

Furthermore now developers can separate the code from the presentation. This allows a developer concentrate on developing a site while a designer can concentrate on the look of the site. css Zen Garden is an excellent example of this. The same web page is used in all the designs with only the presentation information changing. Each design is radically different from the next.

Benefits to Business

With the content separated from the presentation, it is very easy to have a consistent look and feel through an entire web site. Changing the look across the entire site is easy because the presentation is defined in a central location.

Using web standards reduces the need for Javascript for presentation. This helps search engines read your web pages and this can only improve your search ranking over an identical site that uses Javascript for presentation.

Mozilla.org lists more business benefits of web standards.