Blog Gone Naked!

All day today, April 9th, this blog will be naked. Normally, you see, it is wrapped in a sheet–a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), to be precise, which takes the basic building blocks of Reading Circle Books, the words, paragraphs, pictures, and widgets that make up the content of this site, surrounds them with padding, backgrounds, borders, and margins, and lays them out on the page for you to see, as in this cool 3-D demo.

The result is amazingly powerful. The same set of content can be presented in many different ways, as you can see by selecting different designs from the menus at CSS Zen Garden or Sandbox Designs Live.

But you might have to wait a day to see it, because today is CSS Naked Day, when all the Cascading Style Sheets are stripped off of participating sites, and all you can see is the underlying structure built out of plain HTML. Presentation is important, but presentation is built on content and structure; without a strong foundation, the style matters little. (And when content, structure, and style are there, then maybe some JavaScript can add some helpful behavior, if it promises to play by the rules.)

The structure you’re seeing here is generated by WordPress via the Sandbox Theme, and displayed as your browser sees fit.

Ready to learn more? Visit the reference pages or (more advanced) tutorials on Sitepoint, or check out these books:

Amazon.com Widgets