I’m Naked!
With all the problems with Permalinks lately, you might be wondering if I’ve lost my fabulous theme as well. Nope. I’m naked today.
April 9th is CSS Naked Day this year. Today web developers and designers all around the world will be showing off their mastery of web standards in two ways:
First, our design is separate from our content. Content is marked up using (X)HTML and does not contain <font> or (gulp) <marquee> tags. All colors, fonts, sizes, backgrounds, etc. are defined in external CSS files that are organized and easy to update (they are organized, right?). These CSS files are site-wide (as much as possible) and are cached by browsers, making our pages faster to load.
Second, our content is marked up semantically and can easily be used without all the fancy styling. Part of my development process is to review the pages I’m working on with CSS turned off. The fabulous Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox makes this extremely easy and no web developer/designer has an excuse for not taking this step.
Disclaimer
Now, this site is actually a bit of a cop-out. I don’t have any static pages at the moment, I’m running WordPress. I didn’t even write my own templates. All I had to do was install a plug-in.
BUT I do use web standards in my everyday work. I inherited quite a large and complex site built using software that generates HTML 1.0 and full of table-based design. It started out as two web applications and has doubled since I became responsible. Slowly, old pages are worked on and brought up to date. But mostly I’ve been adding new pages or replacing old parts of the app with new parts, etc. These are all written using XHTML and CSS.
So, even though I didn’t code this site, I am participating in CSS Naked Day to show that I do use web standards.