I would like to say that I have never stole someone’s html and css and used it as my own.
I am a coder, by trade (somewhat – I am an engineer who also codes). Originally I grabbed html / css and then took a look at how it worked. I then re-coded everything to make it similar. This means making the code as simple as possible by removing extraneous css info, giving all items ids or classes, etc…
I would never have hotlinked to someones images (or even taken them for that matter – because I think that is theft) nor would I have hotlinked to their css.
In fact, I basically learned off of other webpages. In the end, many portions of my sites are now coded by w3c standards (of which most sites are not) – so obviously I have learned a bit and thankful for all the code out there that helped me to learn.
anyway.. that’s how I learned from others.