Missing the Foolish and Naked Days of April

So, it’s the tenth day into April already. Just a day after Araw ng Kagitingan, two days after Easter Sunday, and the aftermath of the Christian calendar’s holiest week. It’s also been a while since two other notable days in the online world. Here they are, going backwards:

The Naked Day

CSS Naked Day 2007

It’s nothing like the Oblation Run, mind you. CSS Naked Day is a campaign for all web geeks to strip their websites of all formatting—Cascading Style Sheets—on April 5th. Why? It’s good to see how people code their HTML sans the fluff. The point of great, semantic, standards-compliant web design is not having to rely on presentational elements and other hackery to construct websites. If you’ve written HTML such that your website is still easy to understand and navigate without any CSS applied, then April 5 should also be a good day to celebrate that achievement.

(Speaking of web standards, if anyone out there is interested in helping out with the local web standards group, do leave a comment or contact me. Shari Cruz and a bunch of other people are taking steps to formally promote the use of web standards in the Philippines; it would be awesome if you could contribute in any way and learn in the process. I jumped in as soon as I found out about it; you should too!)

I remember when I caught wind of Dustin Diaz’s initial proposal to hold the very first annual CSS Naked Day. Although I participated back then, I simply couldn’t this time. Still, I was looking forward to it this 2007, especially the Filipino bloggers who did (JAngelo, Aja, Yoru, Shari, to name a few), and hopefully for the years to come.

The Fools’ Day

You don’t need to surf the web to know what April 1 is all about. But the online world seems to take April Fools’ Day a little more seriously. Google, who has been known to take special notice of dates all year round with its doodles, is especially enamored by April the first with its hoaxes: this year it announced GMail Paper and Google TiSP.

A gargantuan company playing tricks is fun, alright. So secretive and powerful is Google that this tradition of announcing sometimes real, mostly silly Google products fits its personality and has the media on its toes every single time.

SimpleFools

But how do you play an April Fools’ joke on a blogger? A followed, worshipped, and acclaimed author, designer, and developer who happens to blog? You gang up on him and pirate his logo, that’s what. And after all the hysteria, grab some screencaps to admire and chuckle about it. If you have time to visit the perpetrators of this awesome prank, you’ll be rewarded by witty banter in the comments section, too.

An early version of this stunt was no prank, though: somebody allegedly copied Dan Cederholm’s site logo and sold it for $199 (it’s been taken down from the online shop but many other logos have also been called ripoffs).

(Note to self: if you want a PR8 backlink, join a Flickr group that plans to pull a prank on good-humored A-list blogger and participate. Whoever thought that doing April Fools’ jokes was actually good SEO karma?)

I’m not really a prankster but during the rare times that I think of something, I make sure I execute it. This year, I had too few windows of opportunity. Nobody even reacted when I uttered “Happy April Fools'” nonchalantly at home. And it was the day after a very tiring Philippine Blog Awards night (Corsarius has two better narratives).

See what the rest of the blogosphere was doing that day:

Having a nice summery April yet?

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Design × Code × Words for a better Web,
made in the Philippines by Sophia Lucero.