From Jennifer Kyrnin,
Your Guide to Web Design / HTML.
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I received a comment from a beginning designer who asked:

Maybe some of you smart designer/developer folks can help out a young naive beginner by helping me understand why I’m using only divs, why I spend so much time getting everything to validate, etc.

A.

You shouldn't be using only divs, there are lots of other HTML tags out there that have a purpose and are useful. Check out my Divitis article for more information.

As for why you're spending so much time getting everything to validate, well my first (yes, somewhat sarcastic) answer that comes to mind is "because you are a young, naive beginner." :-)

Seriously, validating is important to make sure that your code works now and in the future. I've got an article on this subject too: Why Validate Your HTML.

As you get more experienced you'll spend less time working on code to get it to validate. But if you don't spend the time now, you'll never learn it.

What Do You Think?

There are as many answers to the "why standards?" question as there are designers. What do you think? Let us know what you think or see what others have said.