CSS Zen Garden is ten years old. If you started coding recently you may not have heard about the site, but Zen Garden was a defining moment in web history.
Zen’s developer, Dave Shea, had a simple objective: to illustrate why CSS should be taken seriously and inspire designers. The concept provided a static HTML page and allowed developers to apply and submit their own styles. The only restrictions were that the CSS should validate and the resulting page worked in IE5+ and Mozilla (Firefox’s predecessor).
The number of submissions increased exponentially and there was a sudden realization that CSS could do more than just apply color to H1 titles. To put it into historical context, by 2003 CSS techniques had been viable for several years but tables and spacer GIFs remained the predominant page layout methods. Tables worked in all browsers and were well understood.
Zen Garden did for CSS what Jesse James Garrett’s A New Approach to Web Applications did for Ajax a couple of years later. The technologies already existed, but it required a spark to ignite developer passion and revolutionize its application.
Zen Garden 2013
Zen Garden achieved its goal — who isn’t using CSS layouts now? To celebrate an amazing ten years, Dave Shea has re-released Zen Garden, put the code on GitHub and started work on a new HTML5 version. A lot has happened in the past decade, so the modern requirements permit:
- CSS3 transitions, transformations, animations, shadows, gradients and effects. Remember to prefix properties where necessary but Webkit-only designs will be “discarded with prejudice”!
- Responsive Web Designs
- Web fonts
- Support for IE9+, recent versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and iOS/Android
New designs can be submitted now. Please send us the URLs of your groundbreaking examples or designs you like.
Craig BucklerCraig is a freelance UK web consultant who built his first page for IE2.0 in 1995. Since that time he's been advocating standards, accessibility, and best-practice HTML5 techniques. He's created enterprise specifications, websites and online applications for companies and organisations including the UK Parliament, the European Parliament, the Department of Energy & Climate Change, Microsoft, and more. He's written more than 1,000 articles for SitePoint and you can find him @craigbuckler.
