It started with framesets and applets. Then onto CSS, around year 2002… ALA became interesting to me during the spring 2003, with its mind-bending “sprites”, “faux columns” and “fuzzy drop down shadows”.

The tables were everywhere duing 2003, and my CSS learning rate wasn’t really that high in the start – mostly because I used Internet Explorer.

Btw – it’s fun to find Björn Thomasson on this page (hi there!) – I worked out at the same kayaking club as him when I was ~11 years. He actually introduced me to HTML. (of course very non-semantic HTML 3, but non-the-less)

A bit off-topic perhaps, but it’s fun to find him here ;). And look at me now – got my own web development company.

I didn’t understand what I copied, but the table stuff caused more problems than it solved because it was so hard to edit a whole website’s design.

Then I learned PHP and how to get data out of databases, then I discovered that my graphics skills sucked, hence my graphical bordered boxes looked rather ugly, yeah, then I started thinking about another way and discovered ALA and other websites concerning web design (I never knew that somehting like that existed!), that was about three years ago, I think, and since then I improved my understanding of web standards, starting with the doctype rules of XHTML 1.0 Transitional, then advanced to strict mode (which took me a lot of time since I didn’t understand why it was so… strict). I followed the masses, so to speak, without knowing what I really did for a long time.

My conciousness or web-savvy-ness grew exponentially during the last 14 months, and now I’m really proud of understanding the principles, being one of the level 4 CSS coders (I think it was level 4, but I’m not sure – the one preceding the “inventor level”), at least in my own opinion.

Yeah, and nowadays I’m 19, develop web pages in my spare time and think about how in the name of god I will ever be able to convince other people, like customers, that I walk a way that’s “more right” than the old one :)

At least a friend of mine, a designer, begins to adopt my principles just because my stuff works an his didn’t :) That’s probably the only way. Making things work.

I found CSS so much more simple than tables.

Years later, after seduction by Malarkey articles with his Ian Dury references, I discovered Web Standards philosophy.

It’s a very simple precept.

What finally won me over to standards was actually a combination of several things…
Firstly the “it must be a way to do this better”-feeling you describe started growing on me back in ’99 or so after a period of teaching basic HTML (Transitional without much attention to details other than what worked “better” i.e. browser-independent in the browsers of that period. – NS4 was among them – GAH).
… and then Zeldman published issue #99 of ALA – WOW!

Secondly back in ’99 or so I had a period in my career that led me into studying the innards of XML – and I suddenly discovered that the DTD:s of the then proposed standard “XHTML” where actually understandable and that the “Strict” variant of that language actually was quite clean and logical… That feeling lay dormant an grew for a while due to some career twists, but when ALA (Zeldman again of course) published the article “Better living through XHTML” in the spring of ’02 about the same time I accidently stumbled upon a certain domain name at nunames, that was all she wrote – I realised that XHTML and CSS was a perfect match for me, and don’t think I’ll ever forget that blissful feeling :)
So from that moment on I was sold enough to start to humbly advocate standards – and that feeling have been driving me ever since…

… and I really think the method “read standards related web magazines and blogs” could work for almost anyone with a basic interest of getting over that “it should be able to do better”-feeling :)