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
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Check All/None Checkboxes Using MooTools

    There's nothing worse than having to click every checkbox in a list. Why not allow users to click one item and every checkbox becomes checked? Here's how to do just that with MooTools 1.2. The XHTML Note the image with the ucuc ID -- that...

  • By
    MooTools 1.3 Browser Object

    MooTools 1.3 was just released and one of the big additions is the Browser object.  The Browser object is very helpful in that not only do you get information about browser type and browser versions, you can gain information about the user's OS, browser plugins, and...

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!