Blue Beanie Day 14: Toque ’em if You’ve Got ’em

On Sunday, November 30, web designers and developers across the globe will celebrate Blue Beanie Day 2014, wearing a blue beanie to show their support for web standards. Join in!

“What’s Blue Beanie Day,” you may ask? Well, it’s possible you’ve seen it in years past: a host of avatars on Twitter and Facebook, with selfies galore, each sporting a little blue toque. Here’s the thing: each is a tribute to the hat that launched a thousand sites: the blue beanie worn by A List Apart’s own Jeffrey Zeldman in that infamous selfie, and that eventually emblazoned the cover of Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards.

But this isn’t a plug for a book, or for the man wearing the rather fetching hat: rather, sporting a blue chapeau is a reminder that web standards—standards like semantic markup, neatly separated styles, and DOM scripting—are responsible for much of the work we do today. In the pre-WaSP, pre-DWWS world, we were forced to build to the idiosycrasies of each broken desktop browser—could you imagine anything like responsive web design without web standards? It’s true: we face a lot of challenges as the web moves beyond the desktop. But as wild and woolly as this multi-device version of the web is, it’d be significantly more challenging without the solid web standards support we enjoy today.

So if web standards have made your life a little easier—and I know I couldn’t do my job without ’em—then upload a shot of yourself wearing a blue beanie, hat, or cap to any of these fine social media locations:

• The Blue Beanie Day Tumblr
• The International Blue Beanie Day 2014 pool on Flickr
• Using the #bbd14 hashtag on Instagram

And there’s no need to wait until November 30: if you’ve got a beanie-enabled shot of yourself, then post away!