D. Keith Robin­son talks about web stan­dards blind­ness, and asks what sug­ges­tions peo­ple have for send­ing the web stan­dards out­side of the switched-on audience.

I have a few ideas — and in fact most of them are things that I’m actively involved in doing right now, so really they’re more than just ideas. The key is start­ing locally — get­ting involved in the local industry.

• User Groups
  Ok, so I realise that lots of peo­ple in the indus­try don’t par­tic­i­pate in user groups at all. In fact, there are a lot of peo­ple who go home at the end of the day and don’t even turn on a com­puter (weird, huh?). But some peo­ple do. User groups are def­i­nitely a good way to raise aware­ness and pro­mote web stan­dards, even with sim­ple things like help­ing out with people’s CSS prob­lems (every­one always has those!). That’s def­i­nitely been my expe­ri­ence with my local Cold­Fu­sion User Group, our local web indus­try asso­ci­a­tion and the fledg­ling Web Women group. I’ll be shame­lessly using these groups to plug Perth’s web stan­dards group meet­ing, which will be get­ting off the ground “real soon now”.
• Work­place
  Obvi­ously not every­one is in a posi­tion to change the pre­vail­ing atti­tude to web stan­dards where they work. But mak­ing man­agers and your peers aware that there even are such things as stan­dards can be a tiny step along the way. I’m for­tu­nate to work in a pretty pro­gres­sive envi­ron­ment, where each new idea is exam­ined on its own merit — that’s basi­cally how we ended up embrac­ing web stan­dards as com­pany pol­icy. It’s amaz­ing where one good idea can take you.
• Job Adver­tise­ments
  This one relies on the pre­vi­ous point. If your com­pany uses web stan­dards, make sure it’s in your job adver­tise­ments — “knowl­edge of CSS and web stan­dards required” (or at least an advan­tage). Peo­ple look­ing for a job see that it’s a skill required in the mar­ket­place — and for a lot of peo­ple that’s the only rea­son worth know­ing something.
• Don’t For­get The Kids
  We get quite a few work expe­ri­ence stu­dents where I work, both high school age and uni­ver­sity level. I always make a point of explain­ing how we use web stan­dards, and why. Check­ing pages with the val­ida­tor tools in the Web Devel­oper Tool­bar is one of the tasks I get my high school kids to do.
  Local uni­ver­sity and TAFE cur­ricu­lum is often dis­cussed in all the user groups that I par­tic­i­pate in, and it seems that there’s a lot of peo­ple in the indus­try that are not happy with what’s being taught. Web stan­dards are only one part of that, and I think in the next cou­ple of years we’ll see a lot more indus­try guid­ance in that area in Perth.

So over­all, there’s still a lot more to do, but a lot to look for­ward to! I don’t see any rea­son to feel jaded about web standards.