Alright, now somebody hand me a towel
I have this picture in my head of hundreds of people standing around in a field the size of a battle area (like in Brave Heart) just running around naked shouting things like Haleluia
and We’re Free, Weeeee!
and for roughly 48 hours we had the party of our lives. And now that that time has come to an end, we’re all standing around looking at each other, in nakedness, with no shame whatsoever. But now it’s time to pass out the towels.
Thanks to all who participated in the first annual naked day event, it was indeed a success. Albeit some negativity in some places around the web disagreeing with the whole concept, I indeed think the point was made and communicated a clear message. One web developer even pointed out that none of the sites that he reads are in this list. Here’s some food for thought. This is a screenshot of the bottom of the list of which I was managing throughout the entire event.
Surely you’ve got to know at least one of those. It was even digg’d to the hompage (nevermind the fact that the comments are generally useless over there). More importantly, it had the support from WebStandards.org which ultimately is what it’s all about.
A few Thanks You
’s
There were quite a few folks out there that I’d like to particularly point out that helped this thing get off the ground.
Alex Giron
The creator of CSS Beauty dropped a news item to the event in less than a minute’s time from the moment I sent him an email. Thanks dude. Viva la revolución!
Mike Davidson
Although he had a rather comical comment about Yahoo!, in the end he came through and stripped off the clothing. It was rather ironic that most the comments found on this Newsvine thread were against the idea, yet the CEO was in fact participating. Props to you Mike.
Ian Lloyd
Not only was this backed by the folks at Wasp, but Ian stripped off the CSS at Accessify. Well done bro.
Molly Holzschlag
When a women invites you to get naked with her, what choice do you have really. I mean c’mon guys. I have to admit, I fell off the chair when I read that headline. Good work Molly.
The Brit Pack
As you might have noticed, many of the Brit Packers stripped down to their… well, as Jeremy Keith said, we don’t need to go into the details of that. Thanks guys.
Håkon Lie
When the creator of CSS is on board. Don’t ask questions. Thanks man. Next time I’ll remember to spell your name right. Confusing How Come
is easy to do. Aside from that matter, your words won’t be forgotten.
Jeffrey Zeldman
As always, it’s never a bad thing when Jeffrey drops a link to your site in agreeance with your efforts toward promoting Web Standards. Thanks Jeffrey.
And to all
Whether or not you made it to the list but still participated, you should all give yourself a round of applause. It is the mass of you who made this successful. We all know what this is really about. Some say that we were trying to achieve a goal but going about it the wrong way. Well I say Posh. Small talk. Our message was clear. I even give props to those who went naked knowing fully well that their markup wasn’t that great. Exposing the fact that we have work to do was received very well. Some had table-developed layouts, while others had inline styles. Regardless of the matter, we all took the risk and it was beautiful.
Note about the 48
hours
For those who just didn’t get the fact that a full day on the calendar is represented as 48 hours. Remember that the world does indeed have time-zones. This may have also confused those who said things to the likes of I clicked on some of the links and at least half of them still had their style sheets enabled.
Well my dear friends, not everyone lives in your little world. It is inded, a much bigger place.
What was it like for you?
I’m interested in knowing if something was brought to your attention. Did anyone else realize the importance of source order and skip links? What about document hierarchy and page structure? Or of course anything else for the matter. Do tell.
April 6th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
I do not believe I have seen any site offering an option to turn the stylesheet back on.
April 6th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Man, that was alot of whiteness and Times New Roman I saw today….and it’s all your fault. It’s made me realise how much I appreciate CSS. Respect though mate, good idea.
April 6th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
@Sarven: I saw at least one give the option, but I don’t really see why one would be against not offering that. If they’ve done their code right, it should be perfectly usable without stylesheets. Wasn’t that sort of the point?
And that’s what I learned…When code’s done right, sites are surprisingly usable without stylesheets. You sort of have to be forced into reading all your favorite blogs without styles to really realize that. I mean I always knew it…but now I believe it.
April 6th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
I enjoyed myself. It was great being part of something big like that. I’m relatively new to blogging, less than a year old, so this was very much fun for me. What I noticed was that I could no longer judge a site by its cover but instead only by its content. Very eye opening.
April 6th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Thanks Dustin, for giving us an excuse to show off our goods. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than well structured markup.
I’m already looking forward to next year.
April 6th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
One of the things I noticed when I reclothed — er, I mean re-enabled CSS — is that it took two refreshes to get the browser to load it. I wonder if it has something to do with the way I stripped down: I just changed the name of the folder holding my CSS files. Was that wrong?
April 6th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
I gave my visitors the option to get my site dressed anytime. It’s a site about digital TV in Spain, so many of then don’t even know what XHTML stands for :P
I also don’t like to take away user options. Once the point was made, many people not only wanted the content, but the links where they are used to. I was told it was *difficult* to find some things: the linearization of all the content may not be that traumatic in a blog, but it seems to be so in my site.
Finally, “my” site is not only mine, so I had to ask “permission”. And the rest of the crew is faaar less geeky than me :D
April 7th, 2006 at 12:19 am
A successful day. I turned of my CSS for 48 hours. In Nepal, there are quite few person/organization that build websites valid in XHTML and CSS. Those 48 hours slaped all those individuals out here who are unaware of web standards. I was getting lots of queries regarding naked day. Well i hope some of them might get aware of web standards.
April 7th, 2006 at 3:30 am
I loved participating, it was fun - can’t wait until next year :).
April 7th, 2006 at 5:01 am
One of the things I noticed was how small a lot of people’s textareas were - using big enough rows and cols is important (although I guess there are probably width issues to consider for mobile users as well).
April 7th, 2006 at 5:45 am
Two things I noticed and learned for myself:
First: shuffeling around content and navigation in document (source) order improved things drastically, also when CSS *is* enabled (so I improved my design in the process!).
Second: to be completely naked, I also had to get rid of local in-line style specs. I managed to invent a kludgy javascript solution [1] for that, which works for Firefox.
Bottom line: the fact that I could learn a thing or two in the process, is even better than the act of participating alone!
1. http://blogger.xs4all.nl/jlpoutre/archive/2006/04/04/85321.aspx
April 7th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Despite all of the negative comments worrying about the end users, I actually received more traffic (and more AdSense revenue) than any other day this entire week.
Let’s get naked again - and soon!
April 7th, 2006 at 7:47 am
On the importance of source order and skip links: I remember thinking back in 2003 when I was just getting into web-standards that css would allow me to put the content right at the top of the document and move the nav anywhere I wanted. Boy was I confused back then. That’s what I got for thinking about web development from the crack-smoking, voodoo-believing perspective of search engine optimization. Besides the fact that this is what meta data is for, that would never fly on CSS Naked Day. I was happy to see consistency in the source order of most of the naked sites I visited, and to see that nobody was smoking crack.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Skip links, “Back to Main page” links, Source order, oh yeah. I had to clean up some of that, too.
It was fun and I enjoyed it. I think one comment that stood out from the negativity was the challenge to make this choice available all the time. So, on my site, I’d have a “turn off CSS” link there for people to use.
Why not? Like it’s said, if your site’s structure is correct, you don’t need stylesheets for it to function.
April 7th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
The question is now what was it good for? The big problem the web standards movement has these days is that there is far too much preaching to the choir. Did it impact positively outside our neighbourhood?
The really interesting bit is not if our blogs worked without style sheets (seeing that many of them were unchanged out-of-the-box templates that was not much of a surprise), the interesting facet of the matter would be if it made non-developers or designers aware about the idea that a web site does not have to be pretty to work, and remind them of the fact that the content is what will reach people and not branding as a means of its own rights. Working with clients like McDonalds and Tourism sites made me aware that this has not really transpired yet - just check the copy on a lot of these pages and see how much sense they make when the accompanying imagery is not available.
If we now just pat our backs with “well done” remarks for the next fortnight, the whole thing was pointless and had not much more impact than a “10 things” meme - bringing up the traffic and interlinking of blogs.
You talk about a clear message that was transpired, but most of the critique I read on mailinglists and other blogs was that there was no clear message and that it confused more people than promoting semantic markup. Many people got the impression that it is clique thing that wasn’t explained thoroughly.
If all that comes out of it is a “Cool, I can’t wait to disable my CSS again next year” it would be a wasted effort and prove the critics right.
We have talked enough to each other, let’s get the message out to the business and to companies developing frameworks and CMSes. If you work in agencies that keep jumping from one product to another and with quick turnover products it is apalling how hard it is even to get valid HTML out there, let alone CSS that is not in style attributes. The smaller products like Joomla or Drupal get it right, the money makers like Tridion, Documentum and Vignette are big offenders. I tried to raise this awareness before and asked for backup from CSS designers, at http://csstoolshed.com but got zilch as the answer. I wonder if most CSS enthusiasts are just lucky enough to work in environments that appreciate web standards or just never tasted the large business side of web development. The other answer would be that it is far too easy to celebrate ourselves than to deal with people we do not really want to talk to as they may bear bad news. Personally, I learnt more from the latter type. A good friend also tells you when something is wrong with you or when you are just dreaming.
As for the naked day, the idea could be taken further:
One next step could be a NOSCRIPT day turning off scripting - and seeing how many AJAX showcases bothered to let the backend take over when XHR is not available.
Another idea would be a keyboard awareness day, with a script overriding each click handler and assigning the real functionality only on keydown. That would make a lot more people aware that keyboard users do benefit from skip links and that it is no fun to get hundreds of links without asking for them.
April 7th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
After the last comment losing my attention after the first 5 lines Ill keep this short –
It was good because it could not be ignored. People saw it and tried to understand it. Its goal was to raise awareness with people whom may not have realized that it was a goal to reach for.
and to extend the Thank you’s one more line .. Thank you Dustin for having a good idea and letting EVERYBODY participate.
April 7th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Ignored by whom? CNN.com, Amazon, ebay and the BBC without a style sheet (as little as they use them anyways) and a good explanation as to why would have not been ignorable. A lot of blogs dealing with web design are ignored by a lot of people - people who do make webdesign decisions for their companies though. Would you learn about someone raising awareness about something really good in anime blogs? I wouldn’t.
Attention span is a terrible thing to lose - I blame MTV.
April 7th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Chris, I think your ideas are good. I chose CSS as it was an easy way to begin the first naked day. It doesn’t need to be remembered as “CSS Naked Day” - but rather the stripping of certain aspects. Perhaps next year we’ll be ready to strip off our JavaScript… or, not even close. With Ajax at the forefront of building newer richer internet applications, it’ll be interesting to see how well our sites degrade without the functionality enhancements.
For instance, in my last podcast with Jeremy Keith we talked a bit on Hijax and the inherit accessibility booster this philosophy takes into account.
The fact of the matter is, we should build “Web 1.0″ first as our base appliaction, then Hijack it with the aid of JavaScript.
Anyway, I blame no one. Life would be pointless without a challenge.
April 7th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
While I’m currently in the process of a rework of my website I missed the opportunity to take part in this event.. At first, I just thought it was amusing, why the heck would I want to turn of my styles? I’m all for semantics and good source and I’d not want to get my website online if those requirements weren’t met.. but deliberately make people use style-less content didn’t seem like such a good plan.. I went and read Dustin’s explaination and motivation, followed a few linkes and read what they had to say about it.
Now while I agree with Chris Heilmann, its fun to just boost our egos as regular ALA readers, SXSW attendees and whathaveyounotofother web-geek stuff, its not about us.. We know.. It’s about getting our point across to the people who don’t care. The managers who decide on the new websites, the local geek who makes the website for the club and everyone else who ever makes anything web-based.
At this point, my argument seems to lean towards it being a bad idea all together.. but I don’t believe it is at all.. Perhaps we, the people who know, should attempt to promote it even more.. A returning nekkid day is a wicked idea and I’m definitely tagging along next year and I’ll be sure to make one heck of a post explaining -why- and -what- for anyone who visits.. but can we think of other ways to promote it while working towards the next nekkid-day?
-R
April 7th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Mr. Heilman points out the analogies in the whole webstandards and accessibility debate, good thinking. To get big corporate sites, high traffic sites, that fail on *unstyled* content presentation, accessibility, bad scripring, validation errors, yes all of themon their knees is make a website with a top 1000 list that uses a star rating system on who well they score on these various criteria. If this site gets well known (media) , it could create a buzz. Sensibilsation creates mobilisation.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
The audience of my website doesn’t care much about web standards. So I translated the idea as “testing if everything in the site worked without CSS”. Yesterday I made a short poll (24h, 723 valid votes) about the experience. For what it’s worth, these are the results:
¿What do you think of the CSS naked day?
- Curious, but I reenabled CSS right away 38%
- I looked around to see how it was 12%
- I was css-less all day and looked everywhere in the site to see how it was 8%
- I even went to see other css-naked sites 2%
- Terrible, it makes impossible to use the site 2%
- Silly, don’t do it again 26%
- I don’t know what you’re talking about 12%
Other than that, I was surprised (but shouldn’t) when I saw the table-heavy phpBB forums in my site looked perfect :| and I made a list of things to fix.
April 8th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I definitely enjoyed the naked day, and I think it was a great idea. However, I really do see what Chris is saying. Yes, much of this is probably ‘preaching to the choir’ but getting people to move toward standards is a SLOW battle, and one that is won one person at a time, not in mass.
For instance, I hooked in a couple of people (people about medium level in CSS) to do the naked day. I spent some hours on messenger helping them fix their code that was twitchy and move things around so it displayed smoother without styles. But in the end - they all got there and did it. More importantly, they were proud of their sites. It’s the same ‘fishing’ mindset I used when I teach web dev - you are dropping line into a sea of people and hope that you lure at least one. Nearly like viral marketing, you want those people to later go out and lure in just one more.
So I think that it did accomplish something - if only by pushing a few old school web devs closer to seeing the benefits of standards, and maybe getting a non-developer or two interested in learning more.
April 9th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Nicole, that’s wonderful to know. I indeed agree on the fact that it takes one at a time, and I’m glad you had an event like this to take the time to educate some other folks on how to markup their site correctly.
April 9th, 2006 at 11:49 am
i think its a great idea. i just with i didn’t stumble across it, 4 days after it happened :(
will definately keep my eyes open for it next year. actually had a cool idea - to have the CSS Naked day, the day before the CSS reboot… turn it off and then turn it back on with the new design…
:) just a thought… use it/dont use it :)
April 9th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
It was cool. I do like MarkB’s idea of having it be the day before the css reboot. What a way to break in a new site look or realign than with naked day!
Viva La Skin!
April 10th, 2006 at 4:27 am
There was also a suggestion on a French blog to try and all use the same design instead of going naked. Sort of like an epidemic of Zen Garden.
In turn I had the idea for a “Zoom layout” day.
Anyway I participated for the fun of it but like many other I am sure it helps spread awareness, if not to the users, at least to the developers.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:14 am
So many of my web-illiterate readers took an interest in what a style sheet was, what accessibility was, and why it all mattered. It was interesting to have so many of those discussions with people who weren’t at all familiar with the concepts behind.
I’ve got work to do with content order and ridding myself of inline styles, as many of us do, so thanks for raising awareness, Dustin.
April 11th, 2006 at 6:49 am
Same as MarkB, I only came across it after catching up on Adactio.
Definately up for next year, with naked angels stripping the stylesheet from from the XHTML.
Great idea Dustin. Maybe we can get Cameron Diaz to be on of the angels next year?
May 22nd, 2006 at 7:27 am
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