A question arose on the way to dinner last night. What was the value of “getting naked” yesterday by stripping off our CSS to celebrate Annual CSS Naked Day?
One of my friends said (perhaps jokingly),
“So over 750 people had nothing better to do today than strip off their CSS. I don’t have time for these memes.”
In response, I said,
This isn’t a meme. This is about Web Standards.
He quipped back,
Yeah, but only the geeks that already know web standards would understand Annual CSS Naked Day.
And while this was a very casual conversation on the way to dinner between friends who often rib each other and push each other’s ideas inside out for exploration sake, the question kept running through my mind, and my heart says…CSS Naked Day is not just some silly ubergeek inside joke. I think it is an awesome way to extend the concept of CSS Zen Garden to all of our sites (whether your site’s design is worthy of the Zen master or not).
It is a delightful way of catching the world’s attention and saying, “Hey, professional web design has changed for good. There is extreme value in separating content from presentation. And semantic markup liberates your data!”
I wonder how many people were inspired yesterday to improve their sites. Did it instigate a redesign, motivate improved semantic markup, shock some poor non-geek into the realization that the web has extremely valuable web standards, inspire a manager to ask his web developer to reveal their own site stripped of css…
So, that is what I think. How ’bout you?
I loathed it. I couldn’t wait to get stylesheets back on, I literally felt naked, like on of those nightmares where you go out with no clothes on. As a designer it really hurt!
It was ‘for the cause’ but maybe not next year!
I didn’t bother, because it did seem like a silly meme and nothing but an inside joke for designers. Taking down stylesheets for a day would mean a day that anyone traveling to the site would think I didn’t know how to make websites. My site needs improvements, I won’t deny that. I just don’t think that something like this accomplishes a whole lot.
On a side note: since I rarely look at designer’s sites outside of NetNewsWire, I only saw one site without its styles and it made me not want to look at any others until I knew that they’d have their styles back.
CSS naked day is a meme. no ifs ands or buts.
it puts design ahead of user experience, which is exactly the thing it claims to be trying to prevent.
if you have to explain it to the user, it’s not a good idea.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about how painful this would be for designers (not being a designer myself)….but if your passion and skills are in the presentation…then stripping the presentation is really like going out in public in your undies.
And as for this being a meme…I just looked up the definition in wikipedia, and realize it is a type of a meme…but for me it wasn’t silly…it was about something I care deeply about, universal accessibility…and I do think the effect of CSS Naked day (on me at least) generated new ideas and awareness of the importance of separating presentation from content.
But hey, that is just my opinion!
It is more than a meme. Maybe the difference of opinion does focus on designer vs. nondesigner (I’m in the latter). It was a good experience, I thought. I had a liberating chance to expose flaws and weaknesses in my site.
I actually spent a day prior to the 5th going through my site looking at each page without stylesheets because I was lacking some navigational elements. On the 5th, I enjoyed having others see my site “naked.” It produced two situations. 1) I got a chance to evangelize some about standards. 2) I got feedback from viewers on how well they were able to use it without the presentation.
Next year, do we need to do this? Perhaps not. I read a great opinion on the whole thing from someone who challenges us to make a “naked” version of our site available 24-7. (Did Hicks just faint? :-) )
I like the idea. If you’re already there, structurally, then make it available 24-7.
Aw, Glenda. Did you leave me anonymous because you were afraid I’d be embarrassed or because you couldn’t remember the exact quote? It’s not verbatim, but I think you got the gist… Just to clarify though, “nothing better to do” was a joke, but it was based on my real belief that it was another meme that only preaches to the choir.
I guess I’m just bitter about memes b/c I had to change my Southpark IM character once that became a meme. That, and nobody noticed the Ninja Tune reference. ;-)
Seriously though, I think “offer it as a permanent option” is a much better idea than “disable it for a day.” That gives everyone a chance to “get it” without forcing it down the throats of the laymen who don’t know about CSS and don’t care to. Come up with a better meme that establishes the point and benefit to those “outside the know” and I’ll get naked with ya…
Sweet James…I left you anonymous ’cause I didn’t want to quote you out of context…and yet your words kept ringing in my mind more than 24 hours after you said them.
While I respect your take on CSS Naked day, I still loved every moment of it and would do it again in a red hot instant. I love the shock factor of it. And I’m not suggesting we do it on amazon, cnn or http://www.utexas.edu…I think the place for this is on our personal blogs…our playgrounds for sharing ideas and experimenting. Sometimes I think we all take ourselves way too seriously.
Of course, the “permanent option” is a fabulous idea as well.