CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty of CSS Design
28 points by jussi
28 points by jussi
Ah, the days when I thought the fake transparency nautilus background hack was as good as the web ever will get.
Well… I'm not sure I was wrong.
I was wondering why I didnt' see the complex spiral when I clicked the link.
Archive.org has it from 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20011001195618/https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html
and csszengarden from 2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20031001180317/http://www.csszengarden.com/
This is ancient stuff
Ah, the days when we used semantic class names so not only was this possible, but userStyles & filter lists (ad block) had something to anchor to in order to make the web work for you. Many web sites have devolved back into div soup with over 9000 Tailwind classes bloating the HTML to make our semantic hypertext markup language “token inefficient”.
To be fair, early Zen Garden with image replacement being the state of the art for fancy layout and decoration, isn't exactly the top dog of semantic layout. It just was there to show what new things you could do, and why you didn't need tables with photoshop-sliced images anymore.
you didn't need tables with photoshop-sliced images anymore
unless designing emails haha
Yes, email is keeping the late 90s alive, both by ignoring the proper formatting we had before, and by not allowing anything later. It's a lost wasteland, frozen in time.
Yeah, I have complained before about Microsoft’s approach to email but I don’t often talk about HTML email because it isn’t something I care about. However it’s another casualty of Microsoft doing their own thing without being part of the email community or the standards process. As a result there’s no way to get multi-vendor consensus on how HTML email should work or how it can be improved. We’re stuck with the crappy ancient subset supported by Microsoft Office.
It's a lost wasteland, frozen in time.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
It's a good thing.
No formatting, at all, ever. This is the hill, etc.
That's what I meant with "ignoring the proper formatting". People seem to be overeager to emphasize, companies like their splashy emails, and then you got things like the mandatory corporate signatures in Germany (often including HTML & images, even if the rest of the email doesn't). alt.fan.warlord would be in complete outrage.
And that's even before we get to the deadly sin of top-posting.
It's hard to take things away from people, I guess. In some groups of friends and collaborators, I get almost an idea of how things were, but even then you get the occassional person being forced to user their company's Outlook, or young people who don't even know the proper way to quote anymore ;)
I think with something post Netscape-era HTML email, we could've done something more semantically interesting, although given how well that worked in the regular web…
makes me wonder how would something like this go in today CSS tech? a site with static content html where you can only change CSS and contribute to a gallery.
I remember making PNG images that repeated to create transparent backgrounds. Especially to make fancier layouts work with IE6.
Good memories