Eric Meyer has an interesting post about how using standards-oriented designs provides a faster web site.
That’s certainly true in my experience, but what I really benefit from is the ease of maintaining and updating my site since I switched to standards-based design. In the bad old days, I relied on bloated, table-based, font-laden HTML for my site design. My finished site would look decent enough, but a few months down the road when I wanted to update it, I’d be faced with a mess of nested tags, stacked like tinkertoys and just waiting to fall apart. After I caught on to the benefits of CSS and redesigned my site (using TopStyle, of course!), maintaining my site became much less of a chore.
So. even if you have a small site and don’t think you’d really benefit from the bandwidth reduction of standards-based design, chances are you’ll still benefit overall from giving up outdated HTML and relying on CSS/XHTML.
(thanks to Jack Brewster for the link)