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April 05, 2006

Lame idea: CSS Naked Day

I'm a big fan of HTML semantic markup, where your web page is coded to describe what something is rather than how it should look, and then attaching the "look" via CSS (cascading style sheets). This is an evolution many web designers make, moving from mere page presentation, to imparting of semantic meaning: this generally makes the pages more accessible and easier to validate. It's just a win all the way around.

There are plenty of sites which advocate this, all for the right reasons, but it's now taken a well-meaning but silly turn: CSS Naked Day. The idea is to show the value of semantic markup by making your web pages look like 1995.

These folks are advocating removing CSS for the day to show that a well-designed site is still functional, because the underlying semantic structure mostly speaks for itself. Though I think that checking out your own site without CSS is an important step in self-validation, it's going to be mostly lost on the overwhelming majority of visitors.

For every person who will visit the site and either think well of me because I know how to code properly, or is even moved to investigate what this is all about, there will be 1,000 who will think that either I don't know how to build a website, or that I'm just an uber geek with limited participation in the real world.

All web designers should visit their own pages with stylesheets turned off to make sure that they're still functional, and it's a fair point to use this technique when evaluating the work of others. But exposing this to the general public will fall so unbelievably flat that I think it will have essentially no effect outside the designer community which is already convinced about this.

There is a difference between a website which uses semantic markup and one which is about semantic markup: the latter will be run by people specializing in web design, and they will have few visitors who don't know anything about the subject. For them, this is probably a way to showcase their skills to a receptive audience. But everybody else will just say WTF?

Now I don't mind silly ideas so much - these folks are standing up for something they believe in - but it seems that the "limited particiation in reality" characterization might be right after all. It seems that when faced with "Not sure this is a great idea" comments, Dustin Diaz repeats his insistance that ssmenatic markup is a good thing (which is true), and claims that non-adherents are jealous because we didn't think of it first.

Ok then.

Posted by steve at April 5, 2006 06:40 AM

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