Where are the geeks?

I had a cool cat stop by the office last week. We talked about starting up agencies and web stuff and geek stuff. It was cool to meet him. But he said something that reinforced what I’ve been feeling about this area and a majority of the web designers around the world in general: There’s a lack of understanding and general knowledge about web standards and why they are important. The web is not going to become a friendly place for everybody if this generation of web designers remains uninformed about the evils of table misuse and the beauty of CSS. Of course, the web is not going to become a friendly place for everyone until Internet Explorer loses some market share and browsers like Firefox start gaining popularity. Anyway, I’ll keep this short. I’m frustrated by the fact that none of the web designers I know are geeky enough to keep up with the current web standards and read up on bullet proof web design and cross browser CSS design. They all seem to give up when it doesn’t work in IE. That’s all.