My Thoughts on CSS Naked Day

By  on  

I've received numerous questions about this over the past two days so I might as well address it. As you probably know, this Wednesday was CSS Naked Day. CSS Naked Day's "official" website says the following about why you should do this:

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good 'ol play on words. It's time to show off your <body>.

While the idea is creative, I wasn't compelled to "expose" my website's <body>. I think the best way to appreciate XHTML, semantic markup, and Web Standards is to just do it. Truth be told, none of my readers want to come to my website and see an unstyled XHTML document. I'm sure advertisers would be thrilled with it too.

It's a really cool idea but it just wasn't practical for my blog.

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Redacted Font

    Back when I created client websites, one of the many things that frustrated me was the initial design handoff.  It would always go like this: Work hard to incorporate client's ideas, dream up awesome design. Create said design, using Lorem Ipsum text Send initial design concept to the client...

  • By
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

Discussion

  1. I have to agree with you – all it serves to do is alienate and confuse anyone visting your site who is unaware of the idea (which would be roughly everyone).

  2. Every day is CSS Naked Day in a way. Anyone could just turn off styles with the Web Developer extension. Now to work on something similar for humans… ;)

  3. @Eric: Agreed and AGREED!

  4. dvdrtrgn

    Forget about the advertisers for one day. Give your readers more credit. @Phil may be confused by pure content but your average tech reader wouldn’t. @Eric is right we know how to turn off styles, but that just begs the question: Is your content be well formed enough to exist without css?

  5. We `Developers` know how to turn off css but the adverage user wouldn’t know how too/or want too. So I disagree that ‘Anyone’ could do this. ‘Anyone with the knowledge’ could.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!