Reasons for stripping down
Christian Heilmann won’t go naked tomorrow.
His reasons not to do so are:
- Most CSS naked sites are generated from templates, so what is the individual blog author’s effort?
- The target audience is missed, it is merely preaching for already converted style purists
- The target market is missed: those really crappy intranets within big corporations
My reasons for still participating with my (slightly modified) WordPress blog…
You definitely have a point with the generated code/templates based blogs. Last year, I adapted my site layout to have the content first and navigation and boilerplate stuff to the bottom in the HTML stream. That was fun and even sped up the apparent rendering of my site with CSS enabled. So I did learn something usefull in the process as well.
That site structure is generated from templates as well, but all handcrafted XML/XSLT stuff (in Firefox, select the alternate style CSS Naked Day to see how it works).
Now I’m using WordPress and, indeed, just installed a plugin for ‘Naked Day. OK, so my contribution was to adapt that plugin for WP 2.1.x.
About the corporate software/intranet stuff: you are completely right. But here I feel that bottom-up advocacy does work in the longer term. In my former (large) organisation, I got quite a few corporate J2EE developers interested in standards compliant CSS web techniques, especially after they had a very bad time trying to meet the requirements from our User Interaction specialists. The advance of Ajax does the rest.
In just another 5 years or so, even those big vendors might have “got it” (and then go wondering what that “semanic web” stuff is all about ;-))
