I have participated in a proud web tradition for two years straight now; CSS Naked Day 2011 and 2012.
It can be explained as removing the styling veil from the “source code” of the web, exposing the truth beneath. While no longer being eye-candy, the website should still look and work just fine. Unless you have used superficial styling to cover up some fundamental mistakes…
The next occasion will be different though, as I have recently moved from Symfony to Jekyll as my website engine. That means I can not do any server-side processing outside of the few times I rebuild the entire site.
So I had to rethink the solution.
Enter CSSNakedDay.js
The result is CSSNakedDay.js; the client-side style stripper!
Basically, it is a piece of JavaScript which attaches itself to the onload event and, when triggered, removes all CSS from the page. It does so by first disabling all external stylesheets and then removing any inline styles. You do not even get to keep your undies.
Just add the JavaScript to your page and it will handle the rest.
Benefits of JavaScript
While working on a solution, I thought of a couple of benefits to using client-side processing with JavaScript, rather than placing the logic server-side.
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Your site should be naked for the user on her April 9th, not depending on what timezone your server is in. Some current solutions works around this by nuding for a full 48 hours, just to be sure. With a client based solution we solve this the right way.
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Doing these computations for every page load, all year around, is unnecessary work for your server. Offload it to the clients instead!
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Stripping away external CSS files is easy but I have yet to see a server side solution remove inline styles, as CSSNakedDay.js does.
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Opposed to other attempts, CSSNakedDay.js have no external dependencies. It is pure JavaScript and as lightweight as it gets.
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Using JavaScript means the HTML will look the same even if it is CSS Naked Day, which in turn means you can cache more to speed up your website.
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If you are on Jekyll or any other static side generator then you really do not have an option.
Get it while it is hot
So get your copy today and give me feedback as you try it out!