pissed off intro

I'm tired, sometimes even angry and I want web standards to make my job 
easier. I'm hoping to learn from the considerable collective experience on 
this list and find out how to evangelize to non-technical people.

Oh, I understand how web standards work and I'm all for it, I just haven't 
had much success in convincing others to have our work future-proofed and 
available on many devices. I'm a young web designer who's only been in the 
field for a few years and I work in-house as the webmaster for a large 
university (biology.ucsd.edu), so most of the problem has nothing to with 
technical details - I'm just at the bottom of a large totem pole. No big 
client list to cycle through for a sympathetic ear. And on a fundamental 
level, web designers are ill-equipped to tell systems administrators why 
they should kill off Netscape 4, since all we can talk about is the user 
experience and not many of their issues, like security, stability, etc. IE 
6 may be a great product, but removing the stink of association with 
anything Microsoft is near impossible. Can you blame them, if all they know 
about Microsoft and the web is the hell created by FrontPage "authors"?

Although my work is starting to gain recognition outside of our department 
and I'm pretty good at public speaking (I just gave my first presentation 
on web standards at a campus conference this morning, it went swimmingly), 
I still haven't had much luck in practicing what I preach and convincing 
others (especially faculty) that degradation in Netscape 4 is an acceptable 
trade off, especially when considering the point brought up by another 
post: there is a distinct lack of killer apps that require web standards, 
since most people don't rely on Pocket PCs or Braille readers on a daily 
basis. Anyone else that works in a university or large government 
organization may be able to sympathize with my plight! Our server stats 
show that upwards of 40% of our audience still use some version of NN4, and 
we get 1-2 million hits a month.

And I'm glad to see others care about this issue:

At 10:53 PM 7/9/2002 +0100, Drew McLellan wrote:
>So how the heck to we make the benefits of standards-based markup/code 
>real to the worker ants on the ground?

At 05:22 PM 7/10/2002 +0100, Isofarro wrote:
>There's no point creating a standards compliant website if the designer
>and the clients don't understand why its good to do so.

Hear, hear. Those are my main concerns also and I am desperately curious to 
hear what works for other people.

And sorry to come across as so jaded - it's just that sometimes I want to 
chuck it all and find a web agency that believes in the same values! 
Evangelism in such a large organization is tiring and I have an INCREDIBLE 
amount of respect for the tireless efforts of the webstandards.org people 
and Jeffrey Zeldman in particular. How you guys and gals keep it up, I 
don't know. Caffeine maybe?

rant over...

Al Abut

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 2002 16:25:01 UTC