CSS Naked Day

Just as one would expect, CSSence.com has CSS Naked Day observation among its Easter eggs. But that hasn’t always been the case.

I’ve been a fan of the idea of CSS Naked Day before I even had this website, but after my site went live in 2011, I never really thought about celebrating it. For many years, April 9 came and went. It was in 2020 when the topic made a cameo on my social media feed. What I didn’t know at the time: The conversation between Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell already contained an important ingredient that four years later would play a role in my implementation of the temporary style sheet removal.^[1]

From 2024 onwards, this site will be displayed without style sheets on April 9.

Famous words

There’s a reason why CSS became HTML’s sidekick. It has always been about separation of concerns. This is what the inventor of CSS Håkon Wium Lie had to say about CSS Naked Day:

This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place. While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning.

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On this day

Coincidentally and coincidently, April 9 is also the birthday of the man behind this website.

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In plain sight

CSS Naked Day observation is displayed prominently on the Settings page. Isn’t a digital Easter Egg supposed to be hidden? Well, there is one more thing to it, but this will be discussed under »Markup«.

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Footnotes

1. Or so it did initially. In the implementation that went live, setting a style sheet to disabled is only done for older browsers. In modern browsers, I decided to swap classnames on page load, to reduce Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC)^[2] and also Flash of inAccurate coloR Theme (FART). ↩︎
2. Although a flash of inaccurate style is much more likely. ↩︎