Others have pointed out that INNER JOIN
helps human readability, and that's a top priority, I agree.
Let me try to explain why the join syntax is more readable.
A basic SELECT
query is this:
SELECT stuff
FROM tables
WHERE conditions
The SELECT
clause tells us what we're getting back; the FROM
clause tells us where we're getting it from, and the WHERE
clause tells us which ones we're getting.
JOIN
is a statement about the tables, how they are bound together (conceptually, actually, into a single table).
Any query elements that control the tables - where we're getting stuff from - semantically belong to the FROM
clause (and of course, that's where JOIN
elements go). Putting joining-elements into the WHERE
clause conflates the which and the where-from, that's why the JOIN
syntax is preferred.