I still don't understand why people refuse to embrace web standards.

Is there an advantage to using tables for layout? Yeah that bloated code and horribly inaccessible code sure sounds great to me too.

You know what sounds better to me? Some nice lean code with a stylesheet to control the style on the site.

There are two sites that I know of that have paid a lot of money to have their sites redesigned:

My high school, Georgetown Prep
A site that I provided maintenance for a few weeks, The Orange Bowl

Try viewing the source of those sites.

Yuck.

It hurts me to look at that. They paid good money for that? How can we educate the companies who built these sites to actually embrace web standards?

The Web Standards Project is a great start. Hopefully they can help to educate others. But they can't do it alone. All web developers who embrace standards need to educate when they have the opportunity. We also need to help fight against Microsoft and their terrible product: Internet Explorer. Sure IE 7 is a huge improvement, but it still stinks. Or how about the fact that Outlook 2007's HTML rendering engine will use Words engine instead of IE's. That sets HTML emails back a good ten years or so.

Embrace web standards!

Keep on fighting the good fight.

Web Standards. What don’t they get?