The most common discussion when it comes to standards is about how you convince your boss or company that standards are the right way to go. There are a million good articles around the Internet about why standards are hot. There are just as many standards junkies working for organizations that can’t see the benefits. The goal of your average standards advocate is obviously to get their clients or organizations to switch to a standards approach. There is unfortunately no way to get them all at once.
Brian McElaney is a Combat Correspondent for the U.S. Marine Corp. He’s stationed in the horn of Africa where he takes part in humanitarian missions. Among his many other duties, he is responsible for maintaining the Combined Joint Task Force website. After his launch he put out a call to all Nerd-dom to help him critique the site. He is attempting to make the site as standards compliant as possible. He chose to use the very forgiving HTML Transitional schema for the site because someday he will turn it over to someone else with no web experience.
In a government which mandates the use of Internet Explorer, and rarely uses web standards when they build their sites, people like Brian become more and more integral in the standards movement. Organizations and branches of the government are won over one at a time. Large organizations like ESPN who have embraced web standards help the effort significantly but its the evangelism of the individuals building new sites or rebuilding old sites that help the movement the most.