well, not really. i'm using a very generic notion of standards: the separation of presentation, structure and behavior. if i build a page with tables, in order to change the design, i have to go change the mark up everywhere that table is. if i use standards, where you use tables only for displaying data, and not for layout, then i can change the entire appearance of a web site merely by changing one file, the .css stylesheet. in other words, the structure can stay the same, but the appearance can change simply by changing the stylesheet. a demo of this is at CSs zen garden. every single design uses the exact same markup. the wide variety of designs is changed only in the stylesheet.
if i want to make the phrase "* = required" bold and red everywhere i use it, on oh, say, 20 forms on a site, if i write this:
<span style="font-weight:bold;color:red;">* = required</span> in 20 different places, I'd have to change it in 20 different places if someone decided they wanted it hot pink.
but if i put that style in a stylesheet, I can change totally leave the markup alone (the structure) and change only the style in the style sheet (which is what web standards meaning: separating structure (XHTML) from behavior (javascript/scripting) from presentation (stylesheets)
so the markup, structure, stays the same in 20 diff places: <span class="highlight">* = required</span>
what changes is one line in the stylesheet:
.highlight{font-weight:bold;color:#f00;}
would change to this:
.highlight{font-weight:bold;color:#f0f;}
it's a lot easier to change #f00 to #f0f on one line, than to do that 20 different times on 20 different pages.
But you wouldn't know the difference between inline styles and web standards approaches as the end user. my boss has no idea what we're talking about. but it is a whole fuckload easier to maintain my work if I used standards, even if it's sometimes more of a pain in the ass with more work and planning frontloaded into the process.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)