CSS Zen Garden was more close to art than to real world production work. It existed to draw a line between the old days' table-based layouts and what CSS brough

CSS Zen Garden was more close to art than to real world production work. It existed to draw a line between the old days' table-based layouts and what CSS brought to the table. In those days CSS was perceived as not powerful and flexible enough, and capable only of boring boxy layouts (which is in fact the favoured aesthetic nowadays) and CSS Zen Garden and other similar sites existed to disprove that notion. Also, some of the core ideals of the time, like obsessing over having 100% semantic markup and the ability to change styles without having to touch the markup turned out not to be that important. And, lastly, if you look at the provided source in CSS Zen Garden you can see that it has a lot of DOM affordances like classes, IDs and even some extra markup to make sure that the CSS author had everything she needed to make his design work. source: I got a design published in the garden a long time ago http://www.csszengarden.com/110/ http://www.csszengarden.com/110/