Blue Beanie of Thankfulness

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

November 30th, 2011 is Blue Beanie Day. It’s a (quite literal) hat tip to Jeffrey Zeldman, his book Designing with Web Standards, and a show of support for web standards.

I regret to say that I’ve never participated in this before. But I’m totally in this year, and I’ll tell you why. This year, it feels like being thankful for web standards. Due to the event’s proximity to Thanksgiving, I think thats appropriate (forgive the U.S. centric connection). Not that I minded the general comradery spirit of years past. Or even the renegade spirit before that. I just quite like the idea of being open about appreciation.

Why has the vibe changed? The war is over man. The bums lost.

The current state of affairs is that browsers are cooperating more, iterating quicker, and following the same specifications. In fact, how much of the specifications they follow and how well is a point of pride and marketing message for them.

Proprietary web technologies are on their way to extinction. If you are a front end developer today, you are working in world built and defined by web standards.

We’re darn lucky to have these standards. Should “The Browser Wars” have ended differently, with browsers rejecting standards, things would be a lot worse. Certainly our jobs would be worse. We may have had to create completely differently coded versions of our websites to work in different browsers, which we may or may not even choose to do based on the difficultly. But it’s much bigger than that. I’m quite sure the World would be worse off. Think of all the ways the web helps people around the world. It helps stimulate economies, it helps educate people, it helps people communicate. A lack of standards would have slowed down the growth of the web and thus less of all those good things.

And so without further ado, with love and thankfulness for all:

I’ll clean my ragged butt up and do a nice photo, hopefully, on the day.