Ups and Downs on CSS Naked Day
Short synopsis: Eh.
CSS Naked Day was definitely a neat idea. Nothing really useful, just neat. I can already inspect markup with all the features Firefox provides me, so seeing a bunch of Vanilla sites wasn't a big deal. There was the benefit of traffic to my site and Liquid Designs (which got a mention on the official page, thanks Dustin), but that was the single benefit. While my markup is hot, and my site looks good and works well when the CSS is removed, it wasn't cause for any of my visitors to exclaim.
But it expounds the value of CSS!
Sure, to us geeks, CSS Naked Day shows how valuable CSS is. But the other 99.99% of web users just don't see that. As for designers and developers that haven't come up to speed with standards, I'm pretty sure that this day without CSS didn't change anything. If anything it was an exercise in futility, falling on deaf ears. Just look at the comments on Digg or Geek.com to see how many people never got the point. Granted, the commenters on Digg are always missing the point (on life, no less), but they are still people this didn't reach. In the end I see this as having been more of an internal thing, like a big standardista flash-mob, than a successful move to promote CSS. Besides, if anyone who doesn't understand CSS visited my site yesterday, I can assure you their response was one of the following:
- "this is some dumb web-design geekery Christian is doing"
- "what is wrong with this site?"
And that is not all
This was really a let down: yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail from Accessites.org. One of the reviewers had gotten to Liquid Designs in their queue of sites to review and big surprise! No design. So to my disdain, that review got slightly delayed.
But the biggest burn of all was when my fianceé looked at my site and remarked, "hmm, I like this look. I kind of like it better than your default look." 
So what now?
Well, I have to say that Dustin had a good idea. I definitely prefer doing something over nothing at all, and I think that this is a good time to talk about Naked Day, talk about what it revealed about our markup (heh, slight pun) and let users know why we did it. As for doing it again, I'll have to think about it. I know it's a year away but I'm thinking that I won't do it in 2007. We'll see.
1 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Pingback: I didn’t go nude this time | The Montoya Herald on April 5, 2007
You bring up some excellent points. And I don't necessarily take this post as a disagreement with the idea, since in fact, you "get it". I would never expect folks at digg to get anything like you said.
That comment from your wife is exactly something my wife would say. Go figure.
Re: Doing it again. Well, as the host, yes, I'll be doing it. But for yourself, that is a personal decision you'll have to make. You clearly understand the benefits (as did most of the people who joined). I think that what it boils down to is "Where are we at as a whole," and Standards, no, not quite. My hope is that this kind of event does indeed whither. In a few years we'll probably be doing this with Javascript
That would definitely be interesting.
It was a cool idea (thanks Dustin), so I took part in this too (for the hardcore full 48 hours). I'm not sure what I was expecting - my site looked like everyone elses and I got a few visitors. Call me fickle (or some applicable word), but I was partially expecting people would maybe come back after and see the CSS'ed version - that doesn't seem the case. Oh well!
The main thing I got from it though was new ideas on how people position elements such as navigation and content in their pages; and accessibility things like "skip to…" links etc. So I learnt some stuff - not a totally wasted day
Javascript Naked Day? Bye bye random monkeys
Not the random monkeys!