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> The CSS Zen Garden worked because everyone was using a single markup file. In real life, it doesn't really work The dream of the CSS Zen Garden never really

> The CSS Zen Garden worked because everyone was using a single markup file. In real life, it doesn't really work The dream of the CSS Zen Garden never really extended beyond itself. That wasn't the point. The point was to show people "look at all these pages that look nothing like each other: they're all the same HTML." That was the magic. Keep in mind the context: you still largely needed structural HTML to effect the layout of your page. Almost everybody was building with HTML where the markup was critical to the appearance. Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and every other tool generated almost no CSS—or at least no good CSS. This isn't my interpretation. From the site itself: > There is a continuing need to show the power of CSS. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. ... CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure.

JimDabell 11d ago
More specifically – because I think this is an aspect that has mostly been lost to time – when the CSS Zen Garden was first created, table layouts were still the norm and there was huge pushback from a surprisingly large number of developers who insisted that it was impossible to use CSS for nice-looking sites. The accusation was that CSS sites were all “boxy” and to get something nice-looking, you had to use table layouts. It was pretty obvious even back then that they were just people who didn’t want to learn something new and they would not listen to anything pro-CSS at all. In fact, developers who insist LLMs are not useful for development remind me of them a lot. Anyway, the CSS Zen Garden was released, and it seemed to shut everybody like that up overnight. It conclusively won the argument that CSS sites could look as good as table-based sites and could even do things the table-based sites couldn’t.

JimDabell 11d ago

More specifically – because I think this is an aspect that has mostly been lost to time – when the CSS Zen Garden was first created, table layouts were still the norm and there was huge pushback from a surprisingly large number of developers who insisted that it was impossible to use CSS for nice-looking sites. The accusation was that CSS sites were all “boxy” and to get something nice-looking, you had to use table layouts. It was pretty obvious even back then that they were just people who didn’t want to learn something new and they would not listen to anything pro-CSS at all. In fact, developers who insist LLMs are not useful for development remind me of them a lot. Anyway, the CSS Zen Garden was released, and it seemed to shut everybody like that up overnight. It conclusively won the argument that CSS sites could look as good as table-based sites and could even do things the table-based sites couldn’t.