CssZenGarden is pretty amazing. A bunch of designers have each used the
same HTML document and created css files that give it radically different
looks.
Some designs I picked out:
neat rollovers:
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/083/083.css&page=2
neat underlines
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/091/091.css&page=1
weird link tricks
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/073/073.css&page=3
neat page frame
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/069/069.css&page=4
crawling underlines
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/063/063.css&page=5
faded background
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/012/012.css&page=11
uses
http://www.csszengarden.com/012/bandwidthkiller.jpg
and
http://www.csszengarden.com/012/bandwidthkiller-alpha.jpg
neat designs
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/026/026.css&page=9
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/092/092.css&page=1
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/027/027.css&page=9
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/033/033.css&page=8
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/034/034.css&page=8
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/059/059.css&page=5
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/022/022.css&page=10
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/008/008.css&page=11
I've heard the complaint that there are extra hooks in the HTML code that
needn't be there semantically and that are only placed there to facilitate
design. I don't see a problem with that, it's a purist "content v.s.
layout" argument I'm just sick of. It's a great theory, and no design
decisions should be made without attempting to keep structure and
presentation distinct. However, it's one of the least productive, most
annoying issues to take a purist stance over, and yet many people do just
that.
Along similar lines, what is this "graphic artists only" thing? If I can
make a design you like am I a graphic artist? and what about "in the past
neat tricks have been reserved for structured codists"? If you can do
neat tricks with css then you are a structured codist, aren't you?
Here are the complaints I have about many of the designs.
- lots of content included in images (in addition to undermining the point of the exercise, it's the most extreme violations of the seperation of structure and design you can have)(why not just lay out your page as one big image, have a css that pulls it in as a background, and hides all the text on the page, making the links into blocks and repositioning them over the images to create an image map...)
- lots of places where position and size is tweaked to fit the content... so substituting a document with the same semantic markup but different amounts of copy would break the layouts
- visited links often not indicated
Dated: 07/01/2004
