Products like Dreamweaver are great tools for learning HTML and once you begin building web sites it becomes an addiction. Sure enough, kids will want to do more and if that desire is strong enough they will go out and learn Javascript, XML, PHP, MySQL, ActionScript or what have you.

Anyway, I think many elitists out there forget where there roots are and like to think of themselves as the untouchable geniuses that they are not.

The best you can hope for is to raise up the “monkeys” by publishing as many articles/how-to’s/tutorials explaining the more complex standards as you are able to and sell it in such a way that everyone starts using them, “monkey” and “homo-sapien” alike. Elsewise you are going to end up stuck in an Ivory Tower of sorts, bemoaning the fact that many don’t use the same standards you use while the rest of the Web marches on whatever path the “monkeys” take it. Seriously, for every one developer who uses, say, architecture patterns in their web development, there are 100 programmers who do not and 1000 “monkeys” who do not. Without selling the standards you want to see in place and making them accessible, they won’t get adopted plain and simple.

Ben Hyde observes (amongst many other things – read the full post):

Another way to condense a difuse market is to raise barriers to entry. But, how do you raise the barriers to entry around HTTP and HTML? Easy. Make them more complex.

Fo