Today marks the second annual “Blue Beanie Day,” an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman’s blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.
We’re big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we’ll tell you why.
As we wrote in our coverage of the first annual Blue Beanie Day last year: standardization creates a playing field that supports innovation by making scalability possible. Standards make life easier for users and for developers, enabling a higher level of abstraction because a common foundation has been established and there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel with every new website.
This year’s been a big one for web standards; the President Elect just enabled users to login to comment on his website using the standard authentication protocol OpenID, for example.
So get your blue beanie or similar hat on and make yourself a photo. Your friends will wonder why you and others are wearing them online today and when they ask either you or Google – they’ll end up thinking about the importance of web standards as a result.
For more info, visit Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog and see if there’s a group relevant to you participating, like the South African Web Standards and Accessibility Group, by whom we were reminded of today’s event.
