Down the web standards hole

You are a webmaster in a rather big corporation and you just cannot unstick your eyes from your screen, currently describing your life :

How do you encourage unenthusiastic developers/mark-up authors to adopt forward-thinking web development methods?

How do you engage people who consider their work on the web as just that: ‘only work’, something that pays the bills but doesn’t exactly leave them beside themselves with excitement?

I am but one individual in a team of many (in my place of full-time employment) and I am from a strange breed - I have a passion for the web! What happens when you are part of a team that is not as uniformly enthusiastic to learn?

This is a problem that faces many IT managers and standards advocates working in the corporate sector. Though we’re doing good things in adopting accessibility practices and optimising our code, it’s still very difficult to get a site to conform to all the major standards in the real world. Why is this the case?

Why, indeed? A must read for anyone involved in making companies switch to web standards, even if you are not a corporate webmonkey.

The quoted article is not an exhaustive list of the problems one can encounter in making a corporation switch (nor does it pretend to be). A very obvious issue being money, for in a difficult economy redesigning their web sites is not exactly on corporations priorities. I might live long enough to may be write something about my own experience in that matter.

On a side note, I shall pay my respects, along with a bit of jealousy and a great deal of envy to these two masters and a former employer.