Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leat­herman

Celebrate JavaScript Naked Day every year on April 24

April 24, 2024

Today my personal web site is being served sans-JavaScript in honor of JavaScript Naked Day.

I implemented this on my web site using a global JS_ENABLED in my Eleventy configuration file (propagated to templates via Eleventy’s global data). This removed the <script> elements in the output of the site’s build.

Origin Story

It started with a toot celebrating CSS Naked Day:

It’s #CSSNakedDay! I love this trend—it highlights the importance of a foundation of good HTML. We need a similar one for JavaScript! #JSNakedDay should be April 10 😅

Related: I first wrote about CSS Naked Day in April 2020.

And then Simon MacDonald ran with it, settling on April 24:

In some countries, “April 24” can be written as “4/24” — which is also the HTTP error code for a failed dependency. JS Naked Day promotes the fact that websites should work without a dependency on JavaScript.

Simon even built a web site: js-naked-day.org

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. He measures website performance with speedlify and at one point became too fixated on web fonts. He has given 86 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Learn more about Zach »