CSS Naked Day, Treating Visitors With Disrespect

CSS Naked Day is a demonstration of how insular the web design community can be. You’ll see many ugly sites today describing how they’ve disabled their CSS to show how their code adheres to web standards. Those sites may be semantically correct without styling but nobody is going to read them. Visitors aren’t going to find out any more about web standards, and most will never visit that site again in the future. It’s a pointless exercise at best, actively disrespectful to visitors at worst.

CSS Naked Day only works on a basic premise – that people who visit the sites with CSS disabled are going to know what’s going on. It assumes an audience that’s in on the joke. That means assuming an audience with an understanding of web design technology, and someone who won’t be surprised by the naked site. It’s disrespectful, patronising and uncaring of anyone who doesn’t fall into that group. That’s the worst possible way to treat a potential web audience.

How Many Of Your Friends Know What CSS Is?

Most people using the internet aren’t techies. They’re regular guys and girls looking for interesting topics, checking up on their social networks, buying shoes, looking at YouTube. They’re also potential visitors to your site, and perhaps potential customers and clients as well. They have no idea what CSS Naked Day is. They have no idea what CSS is! Neither do they care.

My wife and I have been together over four years. I’m a web designer. She learned what CSS was for the first time this weekend. It’s irrelevant to her interaction with the internet. My wife is like most internet users. She wants a pleasant, simple and attractive browsing experience that she understands and is comfortable with. When she comes across a site without CSS then her experience will be jarred. She’ll see a lack of clear options and navigation regardless of how correct the HTML code is. If it’s a site she’s visited before then she’ll probably assume an error or defect.

Making Life Difficult To Promote Web Standards!

The irony is that CSS Naked Day is supposed to be about web standards. Web standards are about accessibility for the end user. To demonstrate and promote these standards the sites taking part in CSS Naked Day make themselves inaccessible and hostile towards new visitors. They take the point of view that a visitor who isn’t already in the know isn’t worth having. They reduce the size of their potential audience and make no effort to encourage a new user who’s shocked and surprised by the unstyled site.

CSS Naked Day doesn’t promote web standards. It makes web sites inaccessible and hostile to the casual user. It reinforces the stereotype that web designers and developers only design for themselves and their peers. That demonstrates a designer or developer who’s missed the point, that websites should be about a great user experience regardless of the visitor’s technical skill.

No serious commercial venture that I know of takes part in CSS Naked Day. They’re rightly more concerned about their customers’ user experience.