Was Egon Right?

I remember when I first got into web design.  I and somewhere around 5 billion other wannabe new media moguls shut off Aldus PageMaker for the last time, opened HTML for Dummies, and set out to change the world while at the same time secretly making lists of who we'd tell to kiss our asses once the bucks started rolling in.

And our web pages all looked like they were designed in PageMaker.  Baroque tables within tables.  Spacer .gifs.  What are standards?  Great evils were committed in the attempt to make Netscape Navigator behave like a sheet of paper, and I'm sure I'll be smoking a turd in hell to pay off my karmic debts.

We did get smarter, though.  As we learned to hate Internet Explorer, we also realized how important things like standards and accessibility were (and are), and began to realize that there's nothing wrong with embracing a new medium.  There are things you can do on the web that you can't do in a magazine, and we began to exploit them. 

Fresh Styles for Web Designers kicked my ass, incidentally. 

As we began to see the value, and even beauty, of this unique new playground, I think we started to regard our print-centric brethren with the same pity and contempt that they have for folks who use glue and x-acto knives to do layout.  After all, how much sense does it REALLY make to constrain one medium by another, increasingly different one?

So why the hell am I spending my day cutting up a PhotoShop file that some gradient loving, rounded corner humping, gluestick smelling designer sent me?  Somebody's getting kicked in the junk.