This blog strips off for CSS Naked Day

browsers css CSS Naked Day HTML5 · 4 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~1,197 times.

Half-a-dozen years ago, I proposed that web developers spend one day a year browsing without JavaScript. It's a great way to see how the web works when things break.

Similarly, April 9th is CSS Naked Day. A chance to throw off the shackles of good design, and see the raw beauty of your HTML. Today is intended for websites to remove their own style sheets - as this blog has done.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. It's time to show off your <body> for what it really is.

But I'd like to go a step further. Turn off page styles while browsing the web. Do it now! On Firefox, it's easy:

Firefox menu. Go to View, the Page Style, then No Style.

You can't change user styles in Chrome. Because Google hates giving users a choice. So open up the Developer tools and paste this into the console:

for (var style in styles = document.styleSheets)
    styles[style].disabled = true;

Take a look around the web. Who is using CSS when they could be using semantic HTML? Which sites hide loads of crap from users. What weird things are being stuffed in their markup? How well does your site work if there's a glitch and the CSS doesn't load? What would the web be like if it were unstyled?

4 thoughts on “This blog strips off for CSS Naked Day”

2020-04-09 13:59

Jude Gibbons said on twitter.com:

Cool! I've had funny looks in interviews when I've said that the web is just text: made to look nice and do things but ultimately just text!

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2020-04-10 02:53

Hales says:

In previous years when helping student with webdev: I used to find many were amazed when I showed them you could just read the source code of other sites (including CSS) to find out how they have done things. The idea of everything being in plaintext is not something they expect, why would they when everything else is opaque? Especially the big frameworks they come to me with 😐 so many misunderstandings and confusions were from them starting with these.

I'm glad the web is still mostly plain and I'm glad HTTP 1.1 is not going away, these things are vital to the long term health of the system. If you cannot understand something then you are doomed to repeat mistakes. Complex websites often last only a few years before being remade.

The CSS naked day website has a list of sites that have participated. I'm going to click a few random ones and see where its takes me.

Reply
2023-04-09 07:25

Timo Zimmermann said on social.screamingatmyscreen.com:

@Edent if we’d have stuck to the idea of user scripts in browsers I’d appreciate if every day would be CSS Naked Day. But with modern frameworks basically requiring every directive to be !important it feels like user scripts became semi useless - if a browser supports them :/

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2023-04-09 12:06

Ian K Tindale said on functional.cafe:

@Edent I must admit I had completely misinterpreted the intent of this day

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