CSS Zen Garden

by onat1 • 1 year ago

329 166 1 year ago

voidfunc• 1 year ago

Blast from the past... I loved the CSS Zen Garden but it's goals and philosophy were oriented to a world where the primary purpose of a website was to serve documents. Our rich media world sort of left this vision of the web in the dust sometime in the mid 2000s.

bigbuppo• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say it's rich media, but the conversion of the web to be 100% marketing-driven. It's ads all the way down.

kome• 1 year ago

"a world where the primary purpose of a website was to serve documents"

we are still living in this world. and i don't mean it snarkily. beside some maps application, most of the web is still about reading stuff, and it doesn't need so much cruft. it's getting more complex just because developers prefer complexity over simplicity.

switch007• 1 year ago

De facto it's a web app, not a document, world. Have you tried browsing without JavaScript recently? It's even worse in this AI era when content sites want proof of work, only available via JavaScript.

nathell• 1 year ago

That’s a serious downgrade.

https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/

est• 1 year ago

Is "modern media" really rich? I think information density and signal-noise actually degrades

alxmdev• 1 year ago

Glad to see the Garden is back! This and Spoono were some of my favorite websites back when CSS-driven web design was bleeding edge and people were just starting to use lots of nested divs instead of lots of nested tables. The book was nice too.

pier252• 1 year ago

A bit of light in the dark ages of Tailwind and CSS-in-JS.

It's difficult to realize how significant CSS Zen Garden was 20 years ago or so.

memonkey• 1 year ago

They published a book that I purchased when I was first learning CSS. Truly a different era.

spiderfarmer2• 1 year ago

It made me fall in love CSS for sure. But it didn’t prevent me from understanding the appeal of Tailwind for large scale projects.

nuw• 1 year ago

Please enlighten me of the benefits of using tailwind in large projects as opposed to using inline styles.

paavohtl• 1 year ago

CSS-in-JS (like how Styled Components and Emotion do it) is primarily a solution to code organization. It doesn't fundamentally change how CSS works.

pier252• 1 year ago

But it's a performance killer

https://dev.to/srmagura/why-were-breaking-up-wiht-css-in-js-...

Edit:

See also this thread on Bluesky

https://bsky.app/profile/infrequently.org/post/3lnehf53bpcl7

lelandfe2• 1 year ago

Bandwidth graciously donated by mediatemple

I wonder what year this last was true.

thm2• 1 year ago

Mediatemple's cult-like following, despite their technical hiccups, was marvelous marketing work.

lelandfe2• 1 year ago

I still have vivid memories of their depiction of the top tier offering as a server filled with fire.

tzury3• 1 year ago

"Everything you love about Media Temple is now at GoDaddy."

Oh lord..

How far back will the Time Machine go today in this thread?

swyx• 1 year ago

i wrote my own version where you can edit the CSS live and see it update :)

https://svelte-zengarden.netlify.app/

(click and drag on the writing hand emoji)

__mharrison__• 1 year ago

Wow! Haven't seen this since the slashdot days.

tzury3• 1 year ago

This site is old, and I mean it in a good way.

This site was a "culture" shock for me, back in 200x and made me walk away from Microsoft ASP.NET and start building apps on linux, realizing all those "server controls" with inline style parameters were basically the complete wrong way, the "anti internet way".

It was Alex Russell (creator of Dojo JS) who showed that side in one of the conferences, and I was shocked how much information I was missing while getting my technical news through Microsoft channels.

For many years, my toolkit was simply Web.py, HTML, JS and CSS.

We then got jQuery, and Backbone, and Underscore, till the React and then TS made new "Full stack" dumber again.

tucnak• 1 year ago

Svelte now exists; it's a bit of a "clever" fullstack

undebuggable• 1 year ago

made me walk away from Microsoft ASP.NET and start building apps on linux, realizing all those "server controls" with inline style parameters were basically the complete wrong way, the "anti internet way".

That's still online, although as an outdated relict: https://www.ajaxtoolkit.net/. There was no enterprise software without drag panel!

For a moment semantic markup and CSS had taken the lead but nowadays I don't even care enough to check what the trends are. Stopped caring around the moment of "HTML inside JavaScript" (JSX).

radicalbyte3• 1 year ago

I started writing ASP & PHP, the whole ASP.Net thing was about helping Visual Studio developers make crappy web apps, it wasn't fit for purpose for the web writ large.

You didn't need to switch to Linux either; I built everything under Windows (IT didn't allow Linux desktops) and deployed it to both Windows and Linux servers.

wordofx• 1 year ago

This site was a "culture" shock for me, back in 200x and made me walk away from Microsoft ASP.NET and start building apps on linux

What stopped you from building such apps on Asp.net? It didn’t prevent you from building anything like that. You could stop creates style sheets and separate JS files.

realizing all those "server controls" with inline style parameters were basically the complete wrong way, the "anti internet way".

Ironically what’s old is new again because we have literally gone full circle even down to nextjs? Recreating view state… and tailwind with inline styling and shadcn with react components.

tzury3• 1 year ago

Indeed. The famous asp.net "__VIEWSTATE" is now back to life...

thm2• 1 year ago

I had two designs there and to this day, I get emails from people seeking permission to reuse the CSS.

pknerd• 1 year ago

CSS Zen Garden was the site that helped me to learn about the wonders of CSS.

insin• 1 year ago

Did anyone ever do a good post-action write-up of how if you actually use the CSS Zen Garden technique for something which isn't a fixed target for demoing the power of CSS and the creativity of those who wield it, you end up with both HTML and CSS everyone is afraid to touch?

When multiple different CSS layouts depend _deeply_ on the specific structure of the markup and the markup _needs_ to change over time, at the least you're in for pain, and at the most you're hosed/rewriting.

milesrout• 1 year ago

The structure of the markup is dependent on the semantic structure of the content that is marked up. The CSS is styling that structure.

The markup shouldn't need to change over time in a way that makes the CSS layouts not work because it just reflects the semantic structure of the document, which shouldn't really need to change. If it does you have quite a different document and so of course it will need CSS changes too.

I was always much more afraid of touching ad-hoc CSS that was written alongside HTML, because it ends up having all these classes and elements that have no semantics and it becomes very unclear what anything actually means. The very worst is the "tailwind" styling where classes etc mean nothing, just styling.

oliwarner• 1 year ago

I disagree. Most websites are a "fixed target". Creating markup that clearly reflects this and then styling that isn't hard.

Maintaining CSS is easier than picking through markup trying to catch all the class names, especially if you use a preprocessor with nesting.

Admittedly in my professional experience, CSS-only refreshes are rare, but in my case only because it's been more common to change the content at the same time.

bpiroman• 1 year ago

Love this! Would be cool if somebody did a css zen garden 2.0 using modern CSS tools. Oh and tailwind css is not aloud lol

meekaaku• 1 year ago

As someone who learned CSS from Zen Garden and the likes of Eric Meyer, modern css tools like Tailwind looks like an anti pattern

throwaway1503• 1 year ago

Absolutely! There are so many problems with Tailwind.

The HTML is littered with styling information. Reading HTML should be about content and meaning, not knowing that "pl-16 pr-8 bg-olive-500 text-gray-700" means "this is probably a card header". But... you might argue that people do not read HTML anymore. Yes, people don't read HTML anymore. Who would when the devs using this framework turn the HTML into a horrible mess! If you litter your HTML with so many framework classes, there is more noise than content in HTML. Is it a surprise that reading HTML has fallen out of fashion? And since nobody reads HTML anymore, devs are totally unhinged with cluttering it with more and more classes and styles. It's a self perpetuating cycle.

Webdevs do style duplication rampantly. Instead of something like ".button", you'd find stuff like "text-white rounded bg-gray-aaa" littered throughout hundreds of places. I'm not sure if this is a Tailwind problem or dev problem but the problem definitely is there. A large project would soon reach a situation where if you want to make a style change across all similar UI elements it's a whack-a-mole game to find out which inline styles in which elements you need to look at.

brailsafe• 1 year ago

I have a fairly strong grasp on CSS, at one point having what I felt was as close to as knowledgeable as I'd care to be about it, but one thing always stuck out as a neverending battle; style organization. I think Tailwind does have all those problems to some extent, but CSS alone didn't find cultural consensus around how best to implement it, always leaning on whichever flavour of the month conceptual framework that was often just one more system to try to manage. There's some virtue in writing the stuff you do cleanly, but sometimes it's just not as valuable to someone who's primarily doing what could be described as complex software development. Sometimes the marginal benefit to a clean implementation and a slightly messy redundant one of the same interactive caliber just isn't that important relatively, especially when the negative qualities are somewhat mitigated by component re-use and scoping.

ookblah6• 1 year ago

yeah, and then one day you want .button, but with a variation. GREAT. but oh no, now there's this other button that has a little bit of a change but not enough to create a separate class. maybe we'll just inline it... but no, i need a mobile selector here or i have some complex hover style. i know, let's create a basic utility class to help me out here. hmm, starting to look suspiciously like tailwind...

now multiply this problem by more people working on an app, with different isolated components that they never even dreamed of during css zen garden's time and this is how something arose. we've tried creating centralized css sheets and it just doesn't work at scale.

so yeah, a necessary evil, but i wouldn't call it an anti-pattern. it grew out of real needs. we had bootstrap and all these css frameworks attempting to make "order" about of something that honestly after decades of working with i don't think can be ever be fully "clean". people just gotta move past it.

chuckadams4• 1 year ago

It's a culture problem with Tailwind devs: for a long time there was a crusade against `@apply` in favor of inlining every class. I think the reason was solely because TW's tree-shaking wasn't very capable then and did even worse with @apply, but the air was thick with specious "philosophical" justifications flying around for inlining all the things. The most typical was "it should always be done through a component toolkit", which of course just buries the problem in javascript -- not to mention doing it dynamically is incompatible with tree shaking, so you end up having to predeclare everything you use...

Nowadays the anti-@apply contingent seems to have gone quiet, so it is possible to not only use TW and similar toolkits sanely (which has always been the case) but to even see people publicly advocating for sanity.

troupo9• 1 year ago

Reading HTML should be about content and meaning, not knowing that "pl-16 pr-8 bg-olive-500 text-gray-700" means "this is probably a card header".

Unlike vanilla CSS where you need to look at browser dev tools and computed styles to figure out why something is styled this way. Because of course it's not styled just by the `.jus-one__more--modifier`.

And Tailwind is mostly there for people developing sites/apps, not reading final HTML. So all that is usually contained in the specific component.

theyknowitsxmas• 1 year ago

I think it works well and is a good standard for companies with hundreds of people. Want to style everything one-off in a landing page go ahead.

amjoshuamichael2• 1 year ago

I think CSS tools like that appeal to people who learned web development in a kind of ad-hoc way. When I first started, I just wanted to make designs I had in my head. I kind of went from "header, text, and image on the page" to, "how do I center this?", "how do I change this color?", "how do I space these elements out?" It wasn't long before I had developed a toolkit of CSS ideas, but once you do that, you lose out on a lot of the finer details that make CSS work well. I knew how to work around weird issues using position: absolute and transform, but I wasn't familiar with block formatting contexts, or the intricacies of the box model. When all of your CSS knowledge is just band-aids placed on your other shoddy CSS knowledge, you're working on fumes. At that point, you could imagine the appeal of grabbing a prebuilt toolkit of composable styles that takes away your access a lot of the available CSS footguns.

What changed things for me was reading an short online book-style series about learning HTML/CSS from the ground up. It introduced everything from first principles, and had an approach where they explained why things were the way they were. They didn't just give you their "top 10 ways to center a div" and ask you to leave. I read the whole thing in an afternoon and it changed the way I think about web development. For the life of me, I can't remember what the book was called. If anyone's read something similar I'd love a reference, it was a while ago now and I'd still like to reference it. I specifically remember them saying "display: block is like a word document, and display: flex is like how you'd expect things to work," which illuminated a lot for me, not just about the display property, but generally about the way HTML & CSS were designed.

lotsoweiners• 1 year ago

What changed things for me was reading an short online book-style series about learning HTML/CSS from the ground up.

Do you remember which one? Your experience sounds a lot like mine and I’d love to learn CSS from first principles.

perilunar8• 1 year ago

Tailwind code is ugly as fuck. I hate it. I was working on some big sites when it came out, and the idea of adding hundred of style attributes each to thousands of pages (instead of just a single class name and few lines in a CSS file) seemed a huge backwards step that undid half the advantages of CSS.

rendaw• 1 year ago

I feel like the main point of css zen garden was how, by maximizing your use of semantic HTML, you could separate the presentation from the content and operate on them completely independently.

While you can still do this to the extent zen garden does, it's really operating within the limits of css (i.e. css can do this, therefore I can create this type of design, not I want this type of design, therefore I need to write this css).

There are lots of style choices that require modifying the DOM directly to effect, and can't be done purely with CSS. I've seen discussions on W3C where it was like "Well if you add another div around this you can achieve this effect, so why do we need a new CSS property?". Stuff like inserting or swapping an image is simple, but swapping a styleable SVG is impossible because the SVG nodes need to be directly embedded in the html.

So you're forced to mix presentation and content structuring decisions at the HTML and Javascript levels and even some simple design changes require modifications throughout the stack.

zelphirkalt5• 1 year ago

On the other hand CSS is very capable these days and many designs, that actually are not flying air castles and take the medium into account, can be implemented flawlessly using only CSS and HTML.

leo-notte• 1 year ago

Agreed. A lot of modern web design problems come from trying to force a medium to do something it was never meant for. If you work with the grain of HTML and CSS instead of against it, you can still build really flexible and beautiful layouts without needing to hack the DOM or pile on JS. zen garden was a reminder of that and it still holds up.

90s_dev2• 1 year ago

The CSS community's promise was always that structure and presentation can be separated.

After my 30 years of writing GUIs, I'm now convinced that this is the wrong place to draw a dividing line.

Instead, we should be isolating intent. This is what Composites do in my project. I'm so excited to announce it next week!

kalleboo• 1 year ago

Enter stage: XSLT

mrfinn• 1 year ago

In the age of spaghetti-mixed Web Components, remember kids you can still be good with yourselves and properly split your Web Apps into individual CSS, JS, and HTML templates files, even going framework-less.

Keep the Zen Torch on.

antirez• 1 year ago

The idea of CSS Zen Garden, that was: to show that you can produce server side simple and semantic HTML, and CSS will be enough to do the rest for the presentation of the content, was an incredible innovation of 200x that was totally forgotten, and that now, younger generation of programmers that grown up with big web frameworks no longer "get". They see CSS as something complex and impossible to handle, exactly because of what modern HTML is (because of such frameworks), without realizing that this is indeed the same problem: that modern web sucks, not that CSS sucks.

pavlov• 1 year ago

What changed was that “web 2.0” happened. Web design’s focus changed from documents to applications.

CSS Zen Garden was about styling “web 1.0” HTML documents.

But dynamic UIs have completely different styling needs. People started building JavaScript applications, and they started needing UI layouts similar to those provided by desktop UI frameworks. And CSS was never designed for that. Concepts like “float” were entirely derived from the word processor universe. CSS had to add several complex new layout engines over the following decades.

ta12653421• 1 year ago

++1

One of the best websites back then, id guess even today?

it was enlightening to work through this book, i even got a hardcopy of it from the local library while being a student

uzyn• 1 year ago

Loved the site and the companion book. Borrowed it at my local library and kept renewing it. Taught me CSS, coming out of hacking CSS with all the weird tricks at that time, and made me realize that you _can_ make beautiful semantic websites without the crazy hacks.

tiew9Vii• 1 year ago

CSS Zen Garden is the good old days of web when people cared.

Now server side rendering is all the rage again, maybe we will also see a comeback of semantic html and simple stylesheets.

martin-adams• 1 year ago

I wasn’t sure how good CSS was and whether it would be good for layouts and such. Then I found the CSS Garden and it was the shining light that made me understand its power.

Similarly, it was ExtJS that made me realise that web sites could be just as good as desktop apps.

throwaway1503• 1 year ago

So happy to see CSS Zen Garden on HN today! Those were the days!

But I've also got to rant now.

What I find most troubling about Tailwind and CSS "frameworks" like it (and modern software development in general) is the growing pride in not understanding the underlying systems.

Tailwind offers a quick, surface-level solution: you can slap some utility classes onto a page and get something that looks "good enough" without ever learning how CSS actually works. Nevermind that the HTML is now a mess where you've got more CSS classes than content!

The attitude is, "Who cares how it works? I got my pretty page. That's a win!"

But this isn't just a Tailwind problem. It's part of a larger trend in the industry: celebrating ignorance, rushing for results without building real understanding.

When did not knowing become something to be proud of? Isn't it sad that depth and mastery are now treated as optional, even undesirable?

/rant

panstromek• 1 year ago

I get the idea, but don't think that's the case for Tailwind. Tailwind classes map directly to CSS properties, you can't really do much with it if you don't understand CSS

throwaway1503• 1 year ago

Are you sure? Could it be confirmation bias because you do understand the CSS?

From what I've seen across multiple teams, it's very common for developers to just slap Tailwind onto their project, copy-paste classes they found online and call it "done." Maintainability and reusability are treated as someone else's problem.

budgi4• 1 year ago

Software development is a layering of abstractions over time. How's your assembly?

vacuity• 1 year ago

How's your Electron app's performance?

It's very concerning when software developers neglect that their tools (abstractions) have tradeoffs.

"If civil engineers built bridges the way software engineers build applications, the bridges would all fall down in a month".

And similar sentiments. Granted, most things aren't mission-critical, but then just because my house won't collapse doesn't mean I want to waste money on poor insulation and broken appliances.

perilunar8• 1 year ago

Nevermind that the HTML is now a mess where you've got more CSS classes than content!

It shocks me how bad most HTML is. I just had a look at Twitter, and a single post in my timeline (a paragraph of text, an image, and ~10 linked icons) was 254 lines and 21.8 kB for just the HTML, and had 104 nested divs and 860+ classes!

That's more classes than characters of text content. About 9 kB of class names alone. And that is then repeated for every post in the timeline.

It should be a few divs max, a couple of classes (+ one for each icon), and a few lines of CSS. Seriously. You could style every post in the timeline with fewer characters than in the class names on one single post.

I don't understand how professional developers can make something so obscenely bloated.

kreetx2• 1 year ago

This site had huge effect on me back in the day!

For those who don't know: for the same html content you could submit a design in CSS and images. For example these impressed me the most:

- https://csszengarden.com/202/

- https://csszengarden.com/189/

- https://csszengarden.com/177/

- https://csszengarden.com/136/

- https://csszengarden.com/206/

There was also one which had a position: fixed knife "cutting the page from the middle" when you scrolled, but it doesn't seem to be on the list anymore. Edit: and another one I remember was like so that the top of the page is sea level and you'd scroll to the bottom of the sea, where there was either an octopus, a submarine or a diver, can't remember.

perilunar8• 1 year ago

Same. Those designs just remind me how boring web design has become.

pantulis• 1 year ago

There was a book by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag called "The zen of CSS design" that explained some of the tricks of the most amazing themes. On my last cleaning I let go of a lot of now obsolete books but that book remains, it's so beautiful!

JimDabell6• 1 year ago

There’s an aspect of this that is not readily apparent unless you were a web developer around the time this was created.

Before CSS, layouts were implemented by abusing table elements to create a grid. Then images were sliced up into sections, and each section was placed into the table. This has generally been remembered in the present day, however what seems to have been forgotten was the pushback against CSS.

There was a large number of web developers who were happy with the status quo and refused to learn CSS. One of the most persistent myths was that you couldn’t make anything look nice with CSS. Specifically, CSS was accused of only being able to create “boring, boxy” designs.

It wasn’t true at all. Even back in the early days of CSS, you could create great layouts. It was especially absurd because the approach favoured by the people saying this was literally abusing tables to create grids.

So along comes Dave Shea and points out that this is ridiculous, that CSS is capable of great designs, and puts the CSS Zen Garden up. A whole bunch of people contribute good-looking designs and make it impossible for people to claim that “CSS can only produce boring, boxy designs”. I think it’s amusing that he won the argument so conclusively that people forget it was even an argument in the first place.

kreetx2• 1 year ago

I'm fuzzy on the timeline, but there was a time where the emerging CSS wasn't up to the task of creating more complex layouts (no flexbox, not to speak of the grid). CSS Zen Garden was just there to show what could be done by that point.

JimDabell6• 1 year ago

Things have certainly gotten easier, but even back then CSS had things like pseudo-elements and display: table-cell. The main problem was Internet Explorer 6 holding everybody back so floats were the main way of laying things out, and those go back to CSS 1 (1996).

Macha• 1 year ago

floats and clearfix were plenty powerful even before flexbox, despite not being intended for the purpose.

But then, neither were tables.

jonwinstanley• 1 year ago

Ahhh yes, floats were everything.

unconed4• 1 year ago

With all due respect to Dave, no. Please stop rewriting history without the relevant details.

CSS Zen Garden is a project that demonstrated that "progressive enhancement" and "semantic HTML" were nonsense. The only reason something like CSS Zen Garden worked at all is because all the markup is fixed, all the content is static, and the designs are not really responsive.

There is no CMS with a theming system that offers the flexibility that CSS Zen Garden claims one can have with a single .css, independent of the HTML. And this is because web developers were huffing the HTML/CSS gospel too much, fussing over not having extra divs in their source and what not, and celebrating "semantic HTML" without ever running their website through a screen reader.

The reason people stopped using table layout when they were doing CSS is because CSS1 did not support the _most common way of doing layout at the time_, and IE6 held the web hostage for a decade. This is a remarkable thing because it means everyone hopped on this bandwagon despite it being very obviously ill-informed and not ready for production. The CSS Zen Garden era designs can be expected to be full of float/clear tricks, requiring careful layout dependency between elements so everything gets pushed down just far enough. And it looks exactly like the table-based layouts they were replacing, except they will scale improperly or not at all.

The "status quo" attitude has also not vanished, as witnessed by CSS variables, custom properties and all the other epicycles that keep getting added on to CSS instead of actually just scrapping the parts that are dumb. None of these CSS experts have the vision or depth of experience to really know what it takes to implement what they spec, or what is even still relevant today and what isn't.

I actually implemented my own web layout system for Use.GPU from scratch, with flexbox and blackjack and hookers, and it's remarkable how much of HTML/CSS you don't need, and also, how many parts of it are still laughably inadequate (like text-ellipsis).

Dave did not win the argument. The people who celebrated CSS Zen Garden were cargo culters who confused a pretty design for a structurally sound layout, and who honestly just wanted something they could feel good about while dealing with pre-Firebug / pre-Dev Tools CSS development.

There is a really easy way to test this too, and I would challenge Dave to do it: translate all the content to another language. See how many of those beautiful CSS-only designs fall apart.

JimDabell6• 1 year ago

This sounds less like you want to correct something I have said that was inaccurate and more like you have a fundamental disagreement with the design of CSS.

Griffinsauce• 1 year ago

[IE] held the web hostage for a decade.

I wonder whether we'll ever get to reach this point with Safari. Especially with regards to PWAs and the insane state of "native" apps.

DaiPlusPlus• 1 year ago

If that's how your feel about CSS, what do you think about XSLT?

timeon• 1 year ago

You could easily make float/clear layout for dynamic content.

radicalbyte3• 1 year ago

The reason we used tables was because getting things right in CSS in the early days across all of the browsers was a nightmare. An expensive nightmare. Which was fine if you were a well funded startup and could afford to rebuild your HTML regularly.

brightball• 1 year ago

The “across all browsers” problem was such a huge pain. Not just for CSS but JS too.

I still remember the campaign for sites to drop support for IE6 in protest.

padolsey2• 1 year ago

It always felt like a fun challenge. For me, it was a crucial part of my love of the web (and eventually, programming): the hackability and the way that there was no canonical correct way to solve a given problem. I miss those days.

suspended_state2• 1 year ago

CSS at the time was still a leaky abstraction: in order to get things working, you had to include extraneous DIVs in the HTML code as anchors for the CSS rules. The standard body has attempted to address this issue with pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes as well as other features I may not be aware of.

At least though, these extra DIVs weren't disrupting the page layout (eg. when disabling the CSS - something that was still possible at the time), which was beneficial for accessibility.

elevaet• 1 year ago

I remember a time when using <div> tags was considered a sign of "expensive" to some.

90s_dev2• 1 year ago

Not to mention that early on, CSS was very lacking compared to today. We didn't even have `border-radius` until something like 2011! Consider that this relatively simple site design[1] takes about 420 lines of modern CSS[2]. And that's even using nesting, and liberal use of :has, which is a game changer. I remember having to restructure both my CSS and my HTML to achieve appearances which were otherwise impossible to create in the intuitive way, all because of inherent limitations to CSS at the time.

[1] https://90s.dev/

[2] https://90s.dev/style.css

katzgrau• 1 year ago

Re border radius… The coveted rounded corner, the mark of a really slick design before that property made it easy :D

I think media queries/responsive is what did in the last bastion of CSS resistors.

darau1• 1 year ago

Modern CSS makes me long for Hi5 to make a comback. My profile would be killer.

immibis5• 1 year ago

Creating a grid is exactly the purpose of a table, not an abuse.

padolsey2• 1 year ago

Semantically speaking, tables are supposed to contain tabular data, not to be used solely for their layout capabilities. That's why it's called an abuse.

Sharlin2• 1 year ago

Tables have existed as part of web standards since the HTML 3.2 standard (January 1997). The standard referenced an earlier RFC and was intended to be compliant with the table tags Netscape had already added to their browser, but this was their official addition to the HTML standard.
The standard pointed out that tables could be used for tabular data or layout purposes, but cautioned that using them for layout would impact accessibility.
In HTML 4 (April 1998), this warning was strengthened to "Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content", and we were pointed to the addition of CSS1 to help accommodate this. It was noted, however, that using deprecated features was expected to continue for a little while [heh] in order to support older browsers (browser listed above).

https://www.tiernok.com/posts/history-of-html-table-layouts....

JimDabell6• 1 year ago

An HTML table describes data that is related across multiple axes. A grid is a typical presentation for that data. That does not mean that creating a grid is the purpose of a table, and it doesn’t mean that any instance of a grid should be a table.

throw310822• 1 year ago

layouts were implemented by abusing table elements to create a grid.

Never understood what was actually wrong with it, apart from the whole "semantic html" yadda yadda that is meaningful for a small subset of applications.

suspended_state2• 1 year ago

> layouts were implemented by abusing table elements to create a grid.
Never understood what was actually wrong with it

Separation of concerns?

Sharlin2• 1 year ago

On the contrary, semantics are very important from accessibility point of view.

jdance• 1 year ago

Yeah me neither, I think the CSS being cool and hard to use was the real reason. People like being ”elite”, and tables were just dead simple.

I am surprised people here still hold on to that era of CSS. There are even people in the comments being proud of clearfix

But I should probably be thankful for CSS for getting me out of webdev early :)

perilunar8• 1 year ago

The main problem with table layouts was that a site re-design meant rebuilding all the pages/templates from scratch, where as in theory CSS-based layouts meant changing just a single CSS file.

In practice though we always had to clean up and modify the HTML anyway. Sometimes just to remove all the old table cruft, but often adding and removing page elements. But pages did become cleaner and easier to maintain without table layouts, so it was a net improvement.

replwoacause• 1 year ago

What an excellent summary.

King-Aaron• 1 year ago

I remember being at Uni and having to build a css zen garden theme as a project, this really dug up some memories for me!

exodust• 1 year ago

I don't remember pushback against CSS, but I do recall it was common for websites to dabble in CSS for styling fonts but still use table layouts. That's not pushback, just practicality.

If you wanted a solid predictable grid, you used table layouts. Particularly for tight and complex layouts. It wasn't uncommon for the navigation section to be a table layout even if other parts weren't. "Pixel perfect" was the name of the game. There emerged some pushback against the elimination of pixel-perfect design, not CSS.

Around 2000, remember spacer elements?

  <spacer width="332" height="1" type="block"></spacer>

They never caught on. Pixel GIFs were more common and predictable.

Until flexbox went mainstream in 2014, CSS float layouts were an exercise in balancing spinning plates. Empty divs didn't behave the same as divs containing content, and it sucked. We'll never get those hours back, but at least we were paid.

The idea that early CSS gave us wonderful "zen garden" layouts doesn't align with my experience. Then again, I was making information media sites not fun arty sites.

RyanOD• 1 year ago

An oldie but goodie. This was my first exposure to CSS and the foundation for the years I taught web design to low-income high schoolers. We would all go to an end-of-the-year web design competition at the local community college. The kids would have to explain CSS to the judges because they had no idea. :)

Many students walked away winning desktop computers (available due to computer lab upgrades). Probably the proudest accomplishments of my career.

If I remember right, I actually sent a few questions to Dave Shea, Eric Meyer, Andy Budd, etc and they replied with help. Forever grateful.

fmxsh• 1 year ago

When I first heard of CSS in a brief discussion, background-repeat and background-position felt like liberation and magic, but also as a strange thing intruding into HTML, as techniques specific to HTML had become tradition, like layout using tables and the 1-pixel gif method to create borders.

Then, later, CSS Zen Garden was very impressive to me, given my limited understanding of CSS.

CSS Zen Garden

Related Stories