Posted by Spartanicus on 05/08/06 22:11

"Michael Laplante" <nowhereman@twilightzone.net> wrote:

>I wondered why. ZenGarden -- which I think terrifically
>showcases the power of CSS -- is sneered at here.

That isn't the general attitude towards CSS ZenGarden. But there is good
reason to do so.

CSS ZenGarden has done and is continuing to do a disservice to the cause
of demonstrating what CSS is about, and proper web authoring in general.
It falsely suggests that CSS as currently implemented by the lowest
common denominator (IE) CSS is capable of fundamentally changing the
layout and look of a site. To create this illusion it litters the markup
with spurious code which makes the code inflexible and difficult to
maintain. They themselves warn against emulating their methods for real
world web authoring, but very few people notice that. CSS ZenGarden sets
a bad example.

Part of it's original goal was to demonstrate to graphic designers who
for the most part ignored CSS that sites created with CSS needed not be
bland, nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately the creators made a huge
mistake in the way that they tried to demonstrate this, using a single
HTML document with only the stylesheet being changed.

The practice of inappropriate "image replacement" techniques that are so
popular nowadays came about in no small part due to the bad example that
is CSS ZenGarden.

--
Spartanicus

[Back to original message]