naked day - april 9th

It’s time to show off your <body>. Annual CSS Naked Day

What a laff! I’ve participated in it in previous years, and Naked Day is always fun. Lots of people around the web make their websites “naked” by stripping out the codes that make them pretty, so we’re left with just a bunch of black text on a white page.

Why would you do this?

To show people that a good website shouldn’t just look pretty, but should have good structure as well. Websites have to be usable by blind people, colour-blind people, and people who have trouble using a mouse or keyboard. Some of these people can’t use Internet Explorer (lucky them) or even gasp Firefox to view their favourite sites. They have to use software that strips away all the pretty colours and flashy graphics, to leave just the meat of the site - the information.

A few years ago the web was a hodgepodge of sites that were unreadable this way because designers didn’t know better, and were most interested in how wonderful their sites looked. So people started to suggest some changes that would make sites behave more appropriately for people who used these amazing programs. Nowadays a good website is made by first creating the page raw, with nothing but plain old text information. Then the designer whips up a fancy design to wrap around it all. It just makes good sense. Everyone wins - people who just want to read their favourite sites, but have some difficulty using regular old web browsers, can still see their sites, and designers can still make their site as fancy pants as they want, and regular Joe is none the wiser.

Except Naked Day is about making Joe wiser. He should know that time and effort goes into making sites usable for everybody. He needs to know so that he can make sure that the next website he designs (in Frontpage probably) or commissions needs to be usable as well as pretty.

So I’m sorry if my (site’s) nakedness offends you, and I hope you can understand. This isn’t about you, this is about me being free… and about making the web a friendly place for everyone.

CSS Naked Day

Update: 2006-04-06 It’s over and I lived!

I’m getting this in early, in case I forget or don’t have time on the day - April 5th has been declared the First Annual CSS Naked Day. No my web site is not broken.

This is a minor big deal in the web world. Credit to Dustin Diaz for coming up with the idea.

To those who don’t understand: CSS is a web maker’s tool for styling a web page. In the early days of the web people used all sorts of tricks just to make their pages look good, but they often only worked on one or two specific Internet browsers. So someone using Internet Explorer might see a pretty web page, but someone else using a Mac’s Safari browser might see something else entirely. Not to mention that all these crafty tricks twisted the information in the web page into nooks and crannies all over the page - making it difficult to extract the information using the ‘wrong’ browser or a web page reader such as a blind person might use.

The people who make decisions about the Internet decided it would be better for the information to be set out logically on the page, and have the pretty designs added later (this was in the original plan for the Internet, but it kinda got forgotten by a lot of designers). CSS is a way of ‘prettying’ a web page without changing the underlying information, and leaving the info accessible in a logical and sensible way. Web designers can make a basic page, and then use different CSS ‘style sheets’ to make the page look a certain way on a computer screen, a different way on a tiny mobile phone screen, even sound a certain way on a web page reader!

If you are here on the 5th of April, you can see this site sans CSS, and you should still be able to find your way around. In effect, this is how a blind person might ‘see’ my site, so it has to still be usable or I have failed to make my site fully accessible. Other sites listed at the above site are going naked too, in an effort to promote this idea of ‘usability’.

If you aren’t here before or after the 5th, you can still see what I’m talking about if you use Firefox, by selecting the View menu > then Page Style > then No Style, or in Opera: View > Style > Usermode.

Select View > Page Style > Basic Page Style in Firefox to go back, or View > Style > Authormode in Opera. It is also possible to do something like this in other browsers, but it can be more tricky.

So enjoy CSS Naked Day, and in the spirit of this nudieness, a lewd joke:
Q: How do you titillate an ocelot?
A: Oscillate his tit a lot!