I stum­bled across this today, speak­ing of the tran­si­tion between tables-based and non-standards cen­tric design to CSS, stan­dards com­pli­ant development.

I’m look­ing for­ward to the next per­son ask­ing me why I care about stan­dards at all get­ting stabbed in the face with this quote:

As for band­width, roughly speak­ing Multimap.com serves 4 mil­lion pages a day. On aver­age, the HTML of the old site weighed in at 65kb per page. The new site pages are half that at 35Kb. That’s a sav­ing of 40,000 Gb of band­width per year! I’ll leave you to trans­late that into money, but I can tell you the move to Web stan­dards paid for itself within a month.

“The move to Web stan­dards paid for itself within a month.”

How incred­i­ble is that?  Admit­tedly, a web­site attract­ing this vol­ume of traf­fic isn’t exactly typ­i­cal of most, but that isn’t the point.

This demon­strates REAL and TANGIBLE ben­e­fits to stan­dards com­pli­ance, besides the other, self-evident ben­e­fits of the same.  What’s not to like about mak­ing the web more acces­si­ble, dis­play bet­ter on all plat­forms, and ulti­mately allow a wider audi­ence access to your resource?

I could rant about this for longer, of course.  I won’t, though.  Check out http://webstandardsgroup.org/ for the source of that quo­ta­tion… they’ve also got a whole heap of other inter­est­ing stuff on there.