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CSS Naked Day  (View post)

CJ Millisock [PersonRank 10]

Wednesday, April 5, 2006
18 years ago5,010 views

I must say, the site looks pretty cool!

Jesse [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I wondered if you'd do it

Utills [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

The only thing I learn from this about your site is that your links for

Home
Forum
RSS
...etc

are all the way at the bottom and not at the top as some may prefer. If someone sees your site on a mobile phone for example (this I suppose being the only feasible application of no CSS, apart from the disability aspect) then I guess they wouldn't want to scroll through many pages to find the link to your forum.

Generally most web developers don't consider alternatives when designing a site. They dont put sufficient backup strategies for people with no Flash, Javascipt or CSS when the technology exists to support it client side.

One thing I've noticed however, about your site is how simple but effective the design is. I love the minimal words per line as I think that it helps the readability of your posts and shows at a glance what post contains.

However, the drawback to this is that the longer posts (your speculations, interviews, reviews, etc), sometimes seem too long and I stop reading about half way through.

Keep up the good work.

Utills [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Oh yeh...and since you often do these kinds of comparitive posts to look back on...

I think you should take screenshots of popular sites/blogs with and without CSS enabled to show bad designs in 2006. This will probably help with your archival look back at sites and how they used to be in the past, say 4-5 years from now when all web design will have multiple stylesheets for mobile, disabled access, TV, and PC displays.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I think putting the navigation after the actual content has pros and cons. I did it so that you wouldn't have to scroll through endless navigation like it happens on table-based layouts. Some people put the navigation after the content but then include a inline-link to the navigation on top. That might be a good solution. Another approach might be to put the core navigation on top using spans, not blocks. Or, one might put the navigation to the top but only on the homepage, and put it to the bottom on archive pages... that's what I once did on outer-court.com...

The CSS Naked Day is an interesting and fun experiment... I actually changed a couple of things with the forum HTML due to it.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> However, the drawback to this is that
> the longer posts (your speculations,
> interviews, reviews, etc), sometimes
> seem too long and I stop reading about
> half way through.

Interesting feedback. I wonder if more in-between images or in-between headlines would help.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I agree with that last comment, and think more in-between headlines may be a good solution.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Phillip, I have to agree with long posts.. especially when I am working of my crackberry.. Secondly, more moblie friendly pages are a good thing to consider as part of content mngt. I assume thats why google/technorati/bloglines/yahoo etc are all having an alternative for mobile users too.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Theoretically it's best to serve a single strict (X)HTML and then integrate the mobile pages via a mobile stylesheet (or to rely on the mobile user stylesheet). In reality many devices pick the screen stylesheet even if that's not conforming to the W3C specs...

Jon Henshaw [PersonRank 4]

18 years ago #

It's cute and all, and most of our sites would still look and work great without CSS, but I'm running business websites. So, I'm keeping my CSS clothes on.

Steven V [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

For a moment there I thought there was something wrong with my browser :) Good stuff nonetheless

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

does anyone notice that the pages load much faster too ??

Manoj Nahar [PersonRank 4]

18 years ago #

I saw the site this way on sunday afternoon also. I guess you were getting ready for big naked day ;)

SCJM [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

When I write webpages from scratch I don't use CSS... it makes the source look ugly.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

It's April 6 here now, so everything's back to normal :)

Sam Davyson [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

That was an interesting little experiment. I found it a little painful myself and am glad to have the niceness back.

Also Philipp – I know they were done a few days ago now but I like the forum improvements. The pages views and curly arrows are nice.

Quick Online Tips [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

I think the sites using tables suffer much less that those using css. I hate it when my external css stylesheets fail to load sometimes – I keep having a naked css day off and on. ;-)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> I think the sites using tables suffer
> much less that those using css

Using table layout you can't control how nicely your HTML will downgrade on smaller devices. With CSS you have full control as the content flow of the HTML must not follow the appearance on the screen. E.g. a navigation row to the left side will always be appearing first in the HTML; using CSS positioning, you can put it either before or after the content block. Of course CSS wasn't meant to be not loaded for some reason... but the rule of thumb is that the HTML should fare OK on itself...

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