Naked designs

Recently the CSS Naked Day was held on the net. A lot of sites in the blogosphere were intentionally stripped of their style clothes, revealing the markup behind it. But I still hear a lot of people in the business who haven’t grasped one of the most fundamental aspects of modern web design: separating structure and presentation.

For instance, have a look at how this site will appear without CSS styling:

Without CSS.

As you can see, the markup and semantic hierarchy is clearly visible. That’s quite a big difference from this:

With CSS.

If you haven’t visited the good old CSS Zen Garden by now, it’s about time you do. And if a single web site won’t do it for you then a deep background to the issue and several of the designs can be found in the newly released book The Zen of CSS Design by well-known designers Dave Shea (father of CSS Zen Garden) and Molly E. Holzschlag.