If you know me, you know I’m a guy who enjoys nakedness, but I think “CSS Naked Day”:http://naked.dustindiaz.com/ is a step in the wrong direction. We all know that CSS makes life much easier than in days of yore when it comes to changing the outfits our websites wear whenever it tickles our fancy. However, unlike certain specimens of the human species, a website doesn’t look all that hot in its birthday suit with all of that white, black, blue, and Serif font hanging out every where. If it did, we wouldn’t bother dressing it up in the first place.
If you really wanted to show off the virtues of CSS and XHTML compliancy you’d provide some method to allow *others* to play dress-up with *your* website. Of course, because even the most compliant websites are not composed of the same parts and pieces (though they use the same building blocks), the best fitting piece of CSS clothing that would be guaranteed to fit any compliant website would look something like a Sarong: beautiful in its own right, but differing almost solely in pattern, color and positioning from outfit to outfit. Such similarity in these variants won’t really make for a very compelling argument.
So lets just keep our sites clothed for today. If you insist on showing off some of that milky white skin, I suggest you “flash your visitors”:http://revjim.net/?nostyle=1 when they ask for it and then quickly put your clothes back on.
There is actually a way you can override the CSS on a webpage (it is in your browser settings… I don’t remember exactly but if you don’t already know how to do this (and I suspect you do) then let me know and I’ll give you more details) and I have on many occasions turned off all the CSS tags and visited websites to see how badly they break. Oddly, I’ve found that the ones which tend to break the most are the websites of big companies. I guess they don’t test for low-end technology as much as we do.
The other fun exercise, of course, is to fire up good old lynx and start poking around to see how badly things break.
Anyway, the point is, if you want to see naked websites you don’t have to ge the webmaster to remove all of the CSS… you can just disable them.
Sadly, I have yet to find a real-world equivalent to this.