John Allsopp’s girl­friend has writ­ten up a really cute post about Catch­ing Web Stan­dards. She calls her con­ver­sion from the “clue­less major­ity” as “sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted web stan­dards”. Now that’s funny.

I didn’t get web stan­dards quite like that… but I def­i­nitely think it’s con­ta­gious, and not just sex­u­ally. Peo­ple either totally rail against the idea, or they totally dig it right away. Occa­sion­ally peo­ple from the first cat­e­gory end up in the sec­ond. Peo­ple who “get it” tend to be very enthusiastic.

Some­thing I’ve come to realise though, is that all tech “reli­gions” tend to be that way. Cold­Fu­sion users? Largely a very enthu­si­as­tic bunch, very “into” their craft. Fuse­box­ers? Total fanat­ics. Mac users, a group I’m def­i­nitely not one of? As far as zealots go, they take the cake. Think about Flash devel­op­ers, blog­gers, eXtreme Pro­gram­ming adher­ents, open source devel­op­ers, Linux d00ds.

The point of this post? I’ve decided any­one involved with com­put­ers and tech­nol­ogy is nuts. I don’t think accoun­tants come home and play with spread­sheets while they’re watch­ing tv. And it’s hard to imag­ine den­tists pol­ish­ing their probes and drills in the wee hours (actu­ally, that’s not so dif­fi­cult to imag­ine — there’s a hor­ror movie in that I’m sure). But com­puter peo­ple seem to live the life 24–7. I def­i­nitely do. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.