November 30th, the official “Blue Beanie Day,” has come and gone. I’m not sure I ever grokked the exact spirit of it, but I’ve written about what it means to me. Last year:
Web standards, as an overall idea, has entirely taken hold and won the day. That’s worth celebrating, as the web would be kind of a joke without them. So now, our job is to uphold them. We need to cry foul when we see a browser go rogue and ship an API outside the standards process.
Building off that, I’d add the need to prevent browsers from breaking things that have worked for half a decade, like iOS 13 did with CSS parallax.
Zeldman, the Blue Beanie Day champion, isn’t particularly optimistic:
Mainly, though, Blue Beanie Day is receding from view because our industry as a whole thinks less and less about accessibility (not that we ever had an A game on the subject), and talks less and less about progressive enhancement, preferring to chase the ephemeral goal posts of over-engineered solutions to non-problems.
It’s people who won the browser wars, so I suppose it’s fitting that people are going to let it slip away.
