Squio.blog

April 5th: CSS Naked Day

Tomorrow, April 5th, is acclaimed Annual CSS Naked Day by Webdeveloper Dustin Diaz of Yahoo!

Funny to see all those nicely designed websites start to look like the old days of HTML 1.0 and the Mosaic web browser.

Strange that most of us need to do our utmost best to live up to this challenge, to make our well designed sites look at least reasonable without any style applied. For me, it is good to experience that following web standards pays off, even in this weird challenge.

In my case I already had positioned my navigation and other non-content stuff absolutely. Now I had a good reason to move this below the page content in the HTML source.
Not only makes this the CSS Naked look neat (relatively spoken), but it also benefits the loading time before the actual content is readable, with CSS applied.

I just replaced my CSS stylesheet by an empty one to accommodate the Aussies’ time zone.
Take a look for yourself and experience the clean look of what the web was like, some 15 years ago…

By tomorrow night all will be back to normal (with slightly improved loading time!).

BTW, there’s some leftovers of in-line style, e.g. for the relative size of links in my tag cloud.

For Firefox, the inline styles can be overridden with this simple Javascript function:

<script type="text/javascript">

window.onload = function() {
	var l = document.getElementsByTagName('*');
	for (var i in l) {
		try {
			if (l[i].style.cssText) l[i].style.cssText = "";
		} catch (e) { }
	}
}
</script>

Notes:

• Untested on MSIE/Windows.
• This trick does not work for Safari/OS-X.

Update: made resetting style conditional:
if (l[i].style.cssText) l[i].style.cssText = "";