When I first starting building real websites, about 3-4 years ago, I started with CSS from the off. That said, I was friends with Simon, so not much choice!

I did find it quite confusing that everyone compared everything to these font tag things I’d never used, so I would definitely have appreciated a start from scratch, not from comparison, approach.

These days when I explain what I’m doing to people I build websites for, I don’t tend to talk about the “other” way of doing it at all. I just explain the content-presentation separation, etc etc and it seems to make sense to them.