They are not the last to "get" standards. Without the support of thousands of designers and developers who signed early WaSP petitions, the browser companies would have been far less likely to change so much so quickly. When the WaSP said it spoke for thousands of developers, that statement was not hype, it was fact.

But many others in the web professional community couldn't really be expected to "get" standards until browsers actually supported them. So browser makers were the first audience we needed to convince. We did that - and the browsers changed. We then began deepening our outreach and educational efforts, sometimes by publishing tutorials and such, and other times by more radical means.

The campaign empowered many designers and developers to start using these technologies. The response came in waves: first independent sites did it, then public sector sites came aboard, and finally big commercial sites like Wired.com and ESPN.com redesigned with standards. Did the campaign really persuade uncle Ralph to drop Netscape 4 like a hot rock? Probably not, and realistically, we never expected it to. Did it coax entrenched corporate and public sector IT heads into upgrading their organization's browser? Possibly, in a few cases, it might have done that. Mainly, it was a designer-developer outreach program, and on that level it worked.

So when the WaSP re-formed "to focus on developer education," it had actually already been doing that. Now it will simply do it in gentler ways - because, now that the climate has changed, it can do it in gentler ways.

During the reformation, the group also began working with leading tool-makers. Because if Dreamweaver didn't generate standards-compliant mark-up, styles, and code, even those professionals who "got" it might not have time to bother with it. The WaSP's Dreamweaver Task Force, led by Rachel Andrew and Drew McLellan, helped Macromedia enhance standards compliance in the leading visual web editor. Macromedia was receptive because they're smart, and because they were hearing about standards from their user groups. Which again suggests that many web professionals already do "get" it.

Did you guys ask Macromedia if you could work with them on Dreamweaver MX, or did they contact WaSP?

WaSP put the idea to Macromedia, but Macromedia already had a relationship with Rachel [Andrew, a DMXzone premium content author] and Drew, who are respected members of the Dreamweaver community, and it also had a relationship with Jeffrey Veen, who is one of the co-founders of The WaSP. So when we first talked to Macromedia in their San Francisco headquarters, it was a very friendly meeting.

"When we first talked to Macromedia in their San Francisco headquarters, it was a very friendly meeting."

And I have to say, the engineers were already very interested in standards and were already beginning to implement them far more rigorously in what would eventually become Dreamweaver MX. So we weren't hard-selling them on something they didn't want; we were offering to help them achieve something they themselves knew was important to their users.

Are Standards preventing people from publishing on the Web by placing barriers to entry (CSS, XHTML etc etc)?

Does English prevent people from communicating? It has grammar and syntax and those are hard. Yet even with a rudimentary knowledge of English, if I yell, "Help! Fire!", you'll understand.

Standards are a continuum of interlocking, empowering technologies. The more you know, the more you can do. But you can do a lot even if you don't know all that much, yet.

If you'd never used JavaScript and were suddenly asked to build a full-fledged DOM-based web application, you'd have a tough time. What happens with, for instance, CSS, is that people who've never used it, or who've barely used it, or who've only used a little of it without understanding it, sometimes try to do a full-blown CSS layout, and those CSS newbies naturally become frustrated.

Well, the trick to learning anything is to approach the problem in stages. If you've always done table layouts and you've never used CSS, stick with table layouts for now, but replace your font tags with style sheets. As you learn more, you'll do more. It's a continuum, not a set of inflexible rules. The second half of Designing With Web Standards goes through the tools and shows how they work together, and in the book we create a hybrid site using tables plus CSS before tackling a CSS-only layout. We do that to remove fear from the equation and to ease the learning curve by letting you work with what you already know.

"Dreamweaver lets an inexperienced person build a site but it does more in the hands of an experienced professional. And that's the nature of web development: it's a great profession for people who like to learn."

Anyone can learn these technologies - you already know HTML; XHTML is essentially the same thing with a few additional rules. Also, the tools keep improving. If you're a content person, not a coder, or if you're a designer who's unfamiliar with the underlying mark-up, there are applications like Dreamweaver and publishing tools like Six Apart's upcoming TypePad that can help you generate compliant sites. Naturally, the more you know, the better these tools work and the more power they give you. Dreamweaver lets an inexperienced person build a site but it does more in the hands of an experienced professional. And that's the nature of web development: it's a great profession for people who like to learn.