Today is the Fifth International Blue Beanie Day in support of Web Standards. If you are a web designer and you strive in your work to follow a set of best practices for standardised, accessible and universal web design and development, then today you wear a blue hat to show support for Web Standards.

Designing and developing websites with web standards means:

• using valid HTML code,
• using semantic code (making sure each section of code is wrapped in the correct tags to give the section value and purpose),
• separating your content ( HTML ) from presentation ( CSS ) and interaction ( JavaScript ).

Doing this brings only benefits:

• valid code means browsers will be better at rendering your page,
• semantic code means search engines will be able to make sense of you page and index the content properly
• separating content from presentation and interaction will make your site load faster in browsers, and will make maintaining your site easier
• and a bonus benefit: it improves accessibility for all users.

Why the blue beanie you wonder?
Well the benchmark book on Designing with Web Standards was written by Jeffrey Zeldman in 2003 and on the cover of the book he wears a blue beanie.

I am a web designer and I not only support web standards, I use and implement them every day.