Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but to me the vast majority of these examples are outright painful to the eye, they remind me of myspace pages and the like. Can anyone really imagine spending any significant amount of time reading / exploring a website that is based on one of these designs? The exception is the main landing page, I like that one.
CSS Zen Garden relaunched
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Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#12As a young web developer, I had been using tables and frames to organize my layout. CSS Zen Garden taught me to separate style and content. I credit this site for making me a better web developer.
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#13I'm sure I'm not alone - this site really inspired me to first get into web design and development. Great to see it alive and contributions as imaginative as ever.
It's amazing the level of nostalgia produced by looking at some of the old designs, like Orchid Beauty[0] and Under the Sea[1]. [0] http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/211/211.css [1] http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/213/213.css
I'm not nostalgic about the old, low-resolution monitors though. The content in those design fits into 630/700 pixel wide columns and the 11 pixel text in Orchid Beauty looks tiny on my screen!
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#14Awesome...I can't remember the last time I've visited this site...but I can't remember a resource on CSS that I ever read before this one...
Even though it's "just CSS"...I think CSS Zen Garden, and other sites like it, were absolutely critical to my web development career. Not because I specialized in web design, but because it demonstrated that CSS was cool...and not just some other syntax to learn (which, when you're new to web development, can be quite intimidating).
Zen Garden inspired me to learn CSS...and it wasn't the CSS itself that was important, but the concept that CSS is based on: separation of presentation and content...something that is very hard to grok until you just do it...Zen Garden's fantastic demos encouraged me to try it out, even if I could never match the site's artistry.
And if I had never gotten the concept of separation down...I don't think I would be a web developer today. I think the maintenance of even a simple personal website built on inline HTML would've driven me to quit web development long ago...
That said, in my career (which admittedly hasn't been focused on design), I've never been in a situation where a client has wanted to redesign the site and to do so was just a task of rewriting the CSS sheets, no matter how well-written the HTML templates were. Redesigns almost always go hand-in-hand with addition of new features, technology, and content...the architectural ideal that CSS Zen Garden strives for is a great one, but it doesn't seem to occur often in professional work.
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#15Good thing Dave never got that Pizza he asked for: https://twitter.com/mezzoblue/status/210779736652251138
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#16It's interesting that some of the designs look very contemporary but only use CSS 1 and 2. Suggests the change in web design is driven more by fashion (or maybe hardware) than by rendering technology.
On the subject of CSS, I've often thought it would be great if somebody made a sort of 'CSS koans.' Like each koan would be a little puzzle where you manipulate the box model etc. to get the desired physical layout.
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#17Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but to me the vast majority of these examples are outright painful to the eye, they remind me of myspace pages and the like. Can anyone really imagine spending any significant amount of time reading / exploring a website that is based on one of these designs? The exception is the main landing page, I like that one.
It's not really there to demonstrate viable page designs, it's to show the flexibility that CSS allows.
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#18Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but to me the vast majority of these examples are outright painful to the eye, they remind me of myspace pages and the like. Can anyone really imagine spending any significant amount of time reading / exploring a website that is based on one of these designs? The exception is the main landing page, I like that one.
It's not really there to demonstrate viable page designs, it's to show the flexibility that CSS allows.
sure I get that ... it's really really cool for that. great for finding out how to do X by example. Just too bad the examples are so ugly
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#19Kind of odd to remember era when CSS Zen Garden launched - when you had to convince people that CSS was a good idea, and when IE leading the way
Ditto! I had the most heated arguments with people who complained that tables "just worked". It didn't help that Photoshop was (is?) king and web slices split into table/tr/td backgrounds was the most common way to display fancier layouts.
I also think existing software played a large part in the proliferation of tables. E.G. WordPress/B2 and phpBB (as well as practically every other forum system) layouts at the time were all heavily dependent on tables. There was really no incentive other than "well, CSS is a better way!" Until you came up with your own examples, there was no convincing.
It was a slow and arduous process, but I hope we keep going forward and not backward into JS-only land.
Re: CSS Zen Garden relaunched
#20CSS Zen Garden was so useful when I started. It was the first time I saw that you could separate markup and style. I impressed my boss by telling him that we could just build one functional site and have different skins and we could save money.