Unintentionally Blank

Phil Nash on the Internet, Web Standards and Accessibility

Stripping Off For Web Standards - It's Naked Day

Apr 02, 2007

by Phil Nash

April 5th is CSS Naked Day

April 5th is CSS Naked Day! What does this mean? If you visit Unintentionally Blank, or any other of the sites on the Naked Day List on April 5th you won't see any of the design that we all put so much effort into. Instead, you will see the bare HTML.

Why Would You Do That?

No CSS? Won't that make the site unusable, unreadable, unbearable? The simple answer is, "No". As this site follows web standards and uses semantic markup, you will still be able to use and read this site as intended. It will all be in black and white and standard fonts, sidebar underneath the main content and none of these fancy gradients, but the text will be there, the headings will be obvious and the underlying structure of the site will shine through.

The aim of the exercise is to prove the benefits of separating content from design, the ability of markup to describe a site in a perfectly readable way and being a bit of a geek. I'd have taken part last year, but this blog was merely a twinkle in my eye then. Still, I remember reading about it last year and wishing I had the ability to take part, not just the site, but the markup too. This year both goals have been achieved and I will be proud to be naked.

Join In!

Is your naked <body> good enough to take part too? Are you going to strip off this week? If you are proud of your code and want to support web standards, join in. If you're using WordPress, there's even a Naked Day plugin available.

Come on, let's get naked!

Unintentionally Blank is Phil Nash's thoughts on web development from 2006-2008. Any code or opinions may be out of date.