Don Quijote's way of life

Working in a webdeisgn firm i always thought there is a place for design and programming standards. When i started there was just design and some barbarous programming. I was not very happy about it but i adapted.

A couple of years ago we had a high peak for programming standards due to a new programmer in the team that changed our complete behavior. Standards were right and fundamental and the firm tried to have both, high design standards and high programming standards. I always thought that would be a good thing and i always thought that both can live together.

But since then some things have changed. Our lead programmer left the firm and i was the one in charge about programming standards. I always tried to be like a rock and getting at least the standards of capital importance in every project.

But it seems i was more like don quijote fighting with windmills. At least from my part of view the firms path is just design, and if comfortable we also like some standards, but that's not important.

My problem is: I like to work and i want to make projects which i am proud of. Unfortunately that means i also want to use standards whenever possible and try to even more enhance our goal to maintaine maximum accessibility.

But to what end? I am tired of telling why we should also program a textonly version, or why we should let people increase their font size, as they wish.

For the first time I found myself thinking if i should leave the company or just stop using standards, and just doing my job without pride, without fun. Using them only in private little projects and do whatever they want.

I found myself asking if i lost something or just found something i don't want to loose anymore..
I found myself asking why do we work all day triing to use standards, doing things "right".. when there is no recommendation, no one that we see it was the right thing to do.

I may sound depressive.. well i am, but where should we go from here... Triing to better our techiques to build more websites which use all standards and have maximum accessability or not..

Is the war worth fighting for?