Then I step back, detach emotionally and realize, some of my deepest dearest friends are from my REAL middle school/high school days. So, when the garbage is flying is actually a wonderful time to figure out who is real and who is faking it. For me, it helps me realize who is a true friend vs. a fair weather one.

I think the point I like most in your post is

If anything, it’s time to take action and stop focusing on ourselves. If you believe in the web, prove it. Don’t write a book, don’t tell us we should embrace web standards and uninstall Internet Explorer. We know we should, we say the same things too. Reach out to your local businesses, write a newspaper article, tell someone who wouldn’t hear about this at a conference.

And I must admit…I’ve seen more real change in the last 3 months on issues I deeply care about (accessibility, blogs/wikis for students at my uni). So…hang in there, pick your friends wisely, and keep spreading the word in the places it most needs to be heard

You are right, you do see people being very self-less with their time. There are tons of people who are self-less in this industry, but there are more than a large handful who are not, whether it is obvious or secret motives (Bugger, now it’s starting to sound like a conspiracy theory ;-)). Just because Gary or such are not self-serving, does not mean others are not. And that is something that I tried to make crystal clear.

And I assure you, when I see selfishness I truly know it.

How is it more impactful when there are thousands of other books saying the same thing? I know a few people who wrote books because they felt they brought something new to the table, but also I know a few people who did it completely for the internet fame.

You missed my point about the local newspaper. They will usually publish an article if they think it’s worthy. Say 100 people read it as it is hidden away, then a small portion decide that this is a good thing. Or someone in the town is trying their hand at web design and rather than going with a nasty WYSIWYG or table based design, they decide to go for the Standards way.

Microsoft know what they are doing wrong, and while I agree with you somewhat. Writing the same email to the same company non-stop is no more effective than sharing it with people who do not know of the accessible web.

It’s often easy to mistake passion for selfishness.

Specifically, in the case of the CSS guru writing a book, I think that could be more impactful to millions of readers to build with proper CSS conventions. Don’t you think that would be more powerful then writing a letter to your local newspaper? I don’t think the local newspaper gives two cents about web standards IMHO.

Don’t you think Microsoft get’s millions of emails from people that are educated from these CSS books to abide by these rules?