Bonne journée du chapeau bleu! Now you know how to say “Happy Blue Beanie Day” in French.

Monday 30 November is International Blue Beanie Day in support of web standards. Get your toque on, post a photo, and pop a beanie on your Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook avatars to help spread the word. Let’s take this viral, kids!

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3142

Filed under: Blue Beanie Day, Code, Community, Design, Education, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, engagement

Fred Blasdel said:

You’ll always draw ire for having stumbled into being the Chief of the cargo-cult side of Web Standards, with so-called ‘XHTML’ as the false idol. You did a lot of good, but not without ambiguating the nomenclature with a lot of feel-good bullshit.

You often find yourself as a mediator between designery folks (who you have a strong grasp over) and technical implementors (who will always hold a grudge against you for muddying the discourse). Asking people to wear blue toques does not particularly affect this balance.

“Cargo cult.” I love that phrase. But I’m not sure I agree with your assessment.

XHTML, with its clearer and stricter rules, came out just as many of us were rediscovering semantic markup and learning of its rich value in promoting content. It wasn’t a coincidence that we took this W3C specification seriously and helped promote it to our readers, colleagues, etc. The stricter, clearer rules of XHTML 1.0 helped enforce a new mindset among web designers and developers, who had previously viewed HTML as an “anything goes” medium (because browsers treated it that way, still do, and quite probably always will; indeed HTML5 codifies this, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing).

Future versions of XHTML became a dead-end not because there was no value in strict, semantic, structural markup, but because the people charged with moving XHTML forward lost touch with reality and with developers. This is why HTML5 was born.

That’s history and it’s human behavior. But those subsequent twists and turns in the story don’t mean that standardistas who supported XHTML 1.0 (or still do) and who used it as a teaching tool when explaining semantic markup to their colleagues were wrong or misguided to do so.

That some technical people in the standards community think we were wrong is known, but their belief does not make it so.

That a handful of those technical people express their belief loudly, rudely, and with belligerent and unconcealed schadenfreude does not make their point of view true or persuasive to the rest of us. It just makes them look like the close-minded, socially maladroit, too-early-toilet-trained, tiny-all-male-world-inhabiting pinheads they are.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3108

Filed under: Blue Beanie Day, HTML, HTML5, Standards, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, XHTML, Zeldman

Monday, November 30th, 2009 marks the third annual International Blue Beanie Day in Support of Web Standards. Don a blue toque to show your support for web standards, grab a photo of yourself sporting said headgear, and upload it to the Blue Beanie Day 2009 photo pool on Flickr. Got an illustrated Twitter/Flickr avatar? Give it a blue beanie designed by Kevin Cornell. Download the zipped Photoshop file here.

• Facebook: Blue Beanie Day event page
• Flickr: Blue Beanie Day 2009 Photo Pool
• Bearskinrug, home of illustrator Kevin Cornell

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2774

Filed under: Blue Beanie Day, Community, Web Standards

Announcing the second annual Blue Beanie Day. Please join us on Friday, November 28, 2008 to show your support for web standards and accessibility.

Participating’s easy: get your picture taken wearing a blue toque or beanie. On November 28, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, et al., and post your royal blueness to the Blue Beanie Day 2008 photo group at Flickr. That’s all there is to it!

Blue Beanie Day is the brainchild of Doug Vos, creator of the Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook. Since October 27, 2007, over 4,300 members have joined, representing over fifty countries.

Doug invented Blue Beanie Day in 2007 to promote awareness of web standards. Blue Beanie Day 2007 can be found on Facebook; photos from last year’s celebration are available for your viewing pleasure.

Tags: webstandards, bluebeanieday

Filed under: Blue Beanie Day, Browsers, Standards, Web Design, Websites