May 2003
CSS Zen Garden launched
Dave Shea launched the CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages. Zen Garden in May 2003 — a collaborative gallery where designers restyle one HTMLHyperText Markup Language — the standard markup for structuring web pages. page using only CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages..
What it was for
The Zen Garden answered skeptics who still treated CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages. as a novelty: hundreds of designers submitted radically different skins of the same markup, proving presentation could be fully separated from structure. It became a teaching reference and helped convince agencies to abandon table-based layouts.
People
- Dave Shea — creator
Why it's here
The Zen Garden showed what CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages. could do better than any specification document.
Why it mattered
It accelerated the shift from table layouts and font tags to standards-based design.
What it solved
Many teams still doubted CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages. could match the visual richness of table hacks and spacer GIFs.
Related
- CSS Level 1 becomes a W3C RecommendationDecember 17, 1996
- CSS Level 2 becomes a W3C RecommendationMay 12, 1998
- Bootstrap releasedAugust 19, 2011