I love using Dev Tools to see how HTML work on websites. It helps me learn and I’m nosey in all honesty. But what if there was no CSS? You’d hope a website would still function without it. After all, CSS stands for cascading style sheet. Jon Kantner tried an experiment where he browsed five popular websites with it turned off.
To do this yourself, Jon gave the following tips:
- Chrome: There’s actually no setting in Chrome to disable CSS, so we have to resort to an extension, like disable-HTML.
- Firefox: View > Page Style > No Style
- Safari: Safari > Preferences… > Show Develop menu in menu bar. Then go to the Develop dropdown and select the “Disable Styles” option.
- Opera: Like Chrome, we need an extension, and Web Developer fits the bill.
- Internet Explorer 11: View > Style > No style
The websites he tried were Amazon.com, DuckDuckGo, GitHub, Hex Naw, Stack Overflow, and Wikipedia.
And his conclusion? Stylesheets should be secondary to the overall structure and function of the site’s HTML. But you already knew that.
Head over to CSS Tricks to read the article in full.