I won\’t go naked this year!
There, I said it. I won’t remove my style sheets of this here blog to participate in the “CSS naked day”:http://naked.dustindiaz.com/. But why oh why wouldn’t I? After all, the other cool kids do it and it promotes web standards and meaningful markup doesn’t it?
Oh look, generated code!
Well, IMHO it doesn’t. Most of the participating sites are blogs, some of them with out-of-the-box templates that weren’t even developed by the authors. I wonder for example how “a PHPBB forum without styles”:http://forum.real-hosting.us/ counts as markup to be proud of.
You can organise have a fashion show of very healthy bodies for an obese audience, but without telling the audience what went into achieving this body and why their bodies will be a problem in the future it is just showing off.
Missing the target audience
I also fail to see the relevance of the whole thing when it isn’t accompanied by tutorials as to what markup you can see and why it made sense to use this kind of element for that kind of job. The argument that it will shake the world and make some visitors wonder why the site looks different and have an epiphany that it all works correctly and immediately get hooked onto web standards is rather moot. This could work if every world portal or large ecommerce companies were to participate, but just a couple of blogs or small web design agencies will not have an impact.
I am not saying that the participating sites are pointless, I am saying that whoever gets there is already interested in web development and frankly if you still haven’t grasped the benefit of semantic markup, please change your job.
Missing the target market
The feel-good factor of the whole thing is great and in its wake last year you heard a lot of people mentioning that we won the web standards war, everything works and wahey. Reality check: go and work with a enterprise level CMS or framework, work on B2B applications, financial or local government sites. When was the last time you have used a company intranet, meeting room booking system, expense system or vacation planner that was not terrible, terrible markup?
I just came back from giving a workshop in Singapore and many of the people in the course were completely amazed with what you can do with CSS and JS when your HTML makes sense. There is a lot of bad code, bad ideas and misinformation out there, IMHO our job is still to get to these people, and not show off and get the Google juice up for a day pointing to our blogs.
Ok, you can call me a grumpy old bastard and spoilsport now, but I really don’t see a point.
Come to think of it, I might turn the “CSS table gallery”:http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/ naked for the day, making it working but pointless.
[tags]cssnakedday,evangelism,reach,communication,marketing[/tags]
April 4th, 2007 at 8:28 am
April 4th, 2007 at 9:02 am
April 4th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
April 4th, 2007 at 9:59 am
“When was the last time you have used a company intranet…that was not terrible, terrible markup?”
Thirty seconds ago. Of course, that’s our company intranet, and I built it…
April 4th, 2007 at 11:09 am
I whole-heartedly agree. I mentioned the topics you covered last year. The target audience already ‘gets it’ and a lot of those participating are simply restyled WordPress blogs…
The only thing which came out of it last year, was a few people realising their comment textareas were too small, because they hadn’t set the cols and rows attributes.
It seems like a pat-on-the-back and Google Juice exercise… but hey, like you said, all the cool kids are doing it.
April 4th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Naked Day was great the first time around. The second time it was ok. Now, it is getting a bit old. I agree that it was a wonderful idea to show off the structural markup with a roadblock of naked pages.
However, too many of us (myself completely included) have gotten lazy on our personal blogs with wordpress and other platforms. If I hand code a site, it’s for a commercial business and I ain’t gonna make them naked for a day.
April 4th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
I’m with you Chris. Anyone saying that that the web standards war is won needs a reality check really badly.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
And why oh why don’t make it just for fun?
April 5th, 2007 at 7:16 am
I disagree with your reasoning..any publicity is good publicity. It does help promote standards at a grass roots level — people may read the explanation and start asking for it.
something along the lines of:
Sue: “Hey Fred, are we 508 compliant?”
Fred: “Are we what?“
Sue: “508 compliant”
Fred: “No idea…doubt it”
Sue: “Oh, what should I tell the client? They are asking.”
…
Anyway, you get the idea.
April 5th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Chris, you are a grumpy old bastard and spoilsport! You don’t need to actually participate in CSS Naked Day to be influenced by it. If you happen to see people on TV running a marathon, you just might be inspired to get off the couch and walk around the block yourself. That is an achievement in itself.
April 5th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
LOL, I do it because I want to be cool and fit in. (But for the record, I wrote my own markup ;)
April 5th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Ba humbug! I take part because it is a laugh. A bit of fun. It’s about being apart of a community. I don’t expect it to change the world. Don’t be such a miserable arse Christian ;)
April 6th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Which makes this blog entry great publicity!
April 7th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I participated this year!
And I am proud of it!
One of my primary reasons for the participating in this year’s event was that I didn’t participate last year, as I did not have any personal website/blog then ;-)
Also, it’s a bit of fun. You strip any CSS you might have to show that the html below is pretty readable and well-orgznized.
As to your note that most of the websites of today are blogs, and most of them pretty standard, and if a standard blog “strips off” its CSS then this is… pointless?
Why?
It’s not pointless, because no matter the site is standard template or not, in case the html is semantic, then the goal is achieved!
I agree with Paul Boag on that, and with Vlad:)))
Anyway…
Everyone is free – to participate in the CSS Naked Day or not…
I am in (was… for 48 hours).
And if next year there’s again a CSS Naked Day, and I have found the free time I need to make my website more personal… then I will be even more proud to strip it off of any CSS:)
Cheers, my % 0.02 :)
(optimiced.com)
April 26th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Naked Day was great the first time around. I Find it was a great idea an Just fun :-)))
Cheers
Uwe