CSS Naked Day

CSS Naked Day is an event on April 9th of each year where participants delete or disable the CSS on their website, to show their content in its raw form.

Motivation

While many participants do it simply for fun, there are other motivations

Accessibility

Over time, we have a tenancy to disregard semantic HTML, instead patching issues with CSS. This is a problem for accessibility because screen readers have a hard time distinguishing the intention of elements without proper HTML markup. By making all HTML glaringly obvious, issues become apparent very clearly. (See #Indieweb Examples)

Community

In many ways, CSS naked day is like the indieweb or webrings. It builds a community of like minded developers by providing a common goal.

Textual Internetting

Some browsers like felynx/elynx/lynx and w3c are designed to be used from the terminal, providing an experience very close to CSS naked day all year
Some indieweb writers maintain mirrors of their website on text only HTTP alternatives like Gemini and Gopher

Indieweb Examples

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

2022

Evan Boehs improved the accessibility of his website in the following ways:
- Tried (failed) making his post list cards more accessible by following this guide
- Making his frontmatter and footer links a definition list (instead of a simple <p>+<ul> and a patch with CSS)
- Using a list of cards instead of divs in order
- Like Anthony Ciccarello, making his SVG's the right size
Jacky Alciné, as of April 2022 participates in CSS Naked Day
Anthony Ciccarello participated this year. Finally got around to reducing the default size of some svg icons which filled the screen without CSS.

2024

Anthony Ciccarello participated this year via a client side JavaScript tag (local time only, not 50 hour international day).

Brainstorming

Why

Brainstorming why:

It's a good day to strip all the styling of your website and start again from scratch with a redesign.