[...] this event forces people [...]

Do not force people. Never. You will always be wrong. Always.

And again, when you mean “forcing people”, the result is really “most people will simply not understand anything, when they *can* understand, and will think it is broken and/or leave”.

This event isn’t meant to tell users that standards advocates don’t care about attractive interfaces. It’s meant to illustrate the importance of CSS and graceful degradation.

Of course, I know everyone means good. I’m simply here to tell you it is, in fact, bad (in its current form, at least, as I said in my previous comment).

From:

And, IMHO, accessibility isn’t really affected without style sheets. In fact, most people to whom these accessibility guidelines are made for would view [or just hear] Web sites without any regard to design at all.

… and:

Why would the switch off of the CSS styles, intended for presentational use only, be a bad usability and accessibility problem? Especially for websites, based on strong semantic XHTML and relying solely on CSS for their layouts?

Accessibility is not just Braille readers and text-to-speech systems for blind people.

There are learning or attention problems, there are visual deficiencies, there are muscular deficiencies, there are paralyses (for any reason, even a broken arm). You can be sick, you can be tired, you can be depressed, you can lack motivation. These all cause access problems.

Now, I’m surely not saying that the design meant by the website authors is always better than the default HTML styles of browsers, but a temporary change is worse, in all cases.

And there are some sites that use HTML so well that they look good even without CSS. For a good example please see http://www.bugrain.plus.com

This is called table design for non-tabular data, and this is exactly what CSS Naked Day is meant to see change.

The W3C HTML 4.01 recommendation says: Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media.

It says so since the 1997-11-07 proposed recommendation of W3C HTML 4.0. It was not in the first draft, but W3C HTML 3.2 says: HTML 3.2 includes a widely deployed subset of the specification given in RFC 1942 and can be used to markup tabular material or for layout purposes. Note that the latter role typically causes problems when rending to speech or to text only user agents.

It also, obviously, is mentionned in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, guideline 3 and guideline 5.

Their horizontal menu also use basic links, without any separation, instead of proper lists. Without the styles, the links are glued together.

Without styles, there is also a wide empty area, near the top of the website (at least in Firefox, but I guess it is here in the other browsers too).

They use single quotes for attributes, which is illegal XML (c.f., definition of the AttValue token, in XML 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#NT-AttValue)), meaning illegal XHTML. They have an XHTML doctype, with an XML declaration.

With JavaScript, they write links including litteral ‘&’ characters as a query string parameter separator, instead of “&” (again, it means the document is malformed).

They have numerous CSS rules in the markup (including many identical long series of rules), meaning very bad separation of content and presentation.

They don’t follow guideline 7 of the HTML Compatibility Guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_7), on the need to use both the “lang” and “xml:lang” attributes to specify the language of the document.

They also have many other problems.

Well, it is now too late to think, because you already stripped (and, I hope, now got your clothes back on), but it is never too late to think about next time (and certainly, what you can do in between…).

Hoping you will all, always stay as motivated as you are,

Cya.

PS: How about a “don’t break your website with misplaced antispam measures day”? Three-link limit, in comments, notably on a technology-oriented website? (and without specifying it, moreover…). It’s just plain wrong.

Yes, this year I finally mustered all bravado to show off my .
This is the annual CSS Naked Day as declared by Dustin Diaz every April 5.
And we pledge allegiance to web standards (and to nudity).
“The idea behind this event is to promote Web S…

I think it is a good thing for promoting Webstandards and semantic html/xhtml! So I support Dustin in this and I’m all in!

Somewhere in the comments I read the following:

While surely good to advocate the W3C (X)HTML recommendations, changing the design of a website for one day is really a bad usability and accessibility move.

Let me not agree with that.

Why would the switch off of the CSS styles, intended for presentational use only, be a bad usability and accessibility problem? Especially for websites, based on strong semantic XHTML and relying solely on CSS for their layouts?

Well, yes, they won’t be so nice, when stripped from their CSS, that’s true – but it’s for 24 hours only, and — what’s more important — they will remain totally accessible and usable!

The point of the campaing is to raise awareness for Webstandards and the more websites are in, the better the goal will be achieved:)

I work with Webstandards and good semantic xhtml in mind for quite a long time. And still, even in 2007, I see new designs coming up, which rely solely on tables, use the famous FONT tag and look terribly distorted when text in them is resized even a tiny little bit.

These types of ‘design’ are quite OK, as long as you see them in a contemporary browser, at their default font size, with CSS and JS switched on.

But open them in a PDA browser, text reader, switch off CSS of JS, try to resize the text in them, and results will be: total, inaccessible, unusable mess.

So if I have to get rid of my CSS for 24 hours, and thus help a campaign which is there to promote the use of semantic XHTML and CSS for presentation, I am all in :-)

Cheers, my $ 0.02 :)

It’s meant to illustrate the importance of CSS and graceful degradation.

My interpretation on it is that it is meant to illustrate the importance of good HTML and markup practices as much as anything else — that CSS is great, but it should overshadow it all. Or maybe that’s just my own philosophy bleeding through. I surely would have called it “Naked HTML day” had I thought the idea up, and explicitly included scripting in the ‘stripped’ category.

Let us also be clear, the group of participants in this event are self selecting, that is no one is forcing a site to remove their CSS [and perhaps other features such as JS that may manipulate style information]. Therefore I don’t see some of the objections to the promotion holding much water, or at least are made up of valid but misdirected concerns.

The maintainers and stakeholders of the sites participating shouldn’t do so lightly, but probably are not, and I would also suspect they aren’t doing so without considering all of the problems involved. And for the rare few that are participating for other motives [e.g. publicity alone] perhaps seeing their work in the unstyled state will lead to improvements.

And for the record, neither of my personal sites will be involved again this year. For most other sites I work on the group of stake holders is far too large to get a change like this through for what is primarily a social or quasi-political statement with little concrete benefits. But that’s the corporate world for you.