What's particularly interesting is that even though "Web standards" are just another skill every developer/designer needs; they still require significant time to learn.
I can see this going somewhere like law, where you're expected to work as a paralegal for a few years doing all the boring stuff, before you're allowed up to the echelons of people actually get things done.
This could happen in segments of the industry. We see a similar pattern with new just-out-of-school backend devs being put in testing or QA Developer roles for the first few years. I generally thing this is a bad idea, since testing is often more difficult than writing the code itself and requires lots of experience, but that might not apply here if the work of the "paralegal" dev was properly defined (I have no clue how, since it seems the only way to learn these standards is repeated failure and iteration).
I can see this going somewhere like law, where you're expected to work as a paralegal for a few years doing all the boring stuff, before you're allowed up to the echelons of people actually get things done.