For years CSS Zen Garden has been my favorite site for showing people the power of CSS. This morning I was about to send a friend a link & discovered it was gone and appeared to have been seized by hackers. Fortunately I was able to find the authors in Wikipedia.
mezzoblue is covering the situation. Soon CSS Zen Garden should be available, but the experience with domain name seizure should encourage everyone who depends upon a domain name to re-think their approach for domain name renewal.
This just in: mezzoblue got things fixed while I was writing this post.
If you have never seen it, check out CSS Zen Garden.
Most people don't quite grasp what they are seeing when they first look at the page. On the right side of the page is a navigation column. Every page has exactly the same content, but CSS is used to alter the style, including positioning.
I know of no other example of the power of layout and typography to create mood, image, branding. Unfortunately many web sites are still based upon older technology or a combination of tables and CSS. Good site design, including design for accessibility, requires more advanced use of CSS, often called CSS-p, where the 'p' suggests 'positioning' through CSS rather than tables.
Links:
Note that CSS level 2 was defined 9 years ago. This is a good example of what really happens on the web. It has a reputation for evolving quickly and there is truth to that, but CSS level two was defined in 1998 and did not achieve wide recognition, or even good implementation, until about 3 years ago. Even now some sites are not using it in spite of clear technical superiority and industry acceptance.
