Standards

After having learned in depth today about XHTML, I'm pondering the implications of a completely controlled standard for web design.  We haven't yet learned about how to design the style of our websites, I've gathered this has something to do with CSS, but I have really no idea what that is.  For now, I think my main concern is that there seems to be so much involved with keeping with standards, I have doubts as to how long users and designers will keep them up.  Humans are notoriously lazy, and judging from how we as humans always seem to find whatever ways possible to cut corners, I think that if it was completely on the designer to hand code the site and content, there would be a swift degradation of standards.  In this way, I think it's fortunate that programs like HTML-Kit and Dreamweaver exist, so that those people who feel the need to design and publish content on the web but are too busy or too uninterested or just too lazy to learn the code and all the complicated standards, are able to quickly and efficiently publish.  The double benefit of these programs is that they allow users to publish their content, regardless of web design and code knowledge base and they make sure that it is not hard to keep within the increasingly strict web publication standards.  As long as the user is told what template and code to choose to work in (like XHTML, XML, etc.) and what version of code to use (1.0, 4.0, transitional, strict, etc.) there is really no excuse to stray beyond the W3C standards.