April 4th, 2007 | 
Author: “The Beauty in CSS Design”
The web is a very messy place. Web standards, in reality, aren’t. But I like to cling to them anyway, because they need the help and they make things much better in the long run. XHTML and CSS, when used properly, let the content writers churn out pure content and the designers worry only about making that content look wonderful, without all the toe-stepping that has plagued this process for years.
Of course, there’s no point in it if nobody uses it, and let’s face it: it hasn’t been advertised very well where it counts. XHTML/CSS is geek stuff. We made it to make our lives easier. It makes the designer’s lives easier too, but they’re not interested in the ramblings of evangelizing engineers. We can show them all the shifted, resized, repositioned and cascaded colored boxes we want; we simply aren’t speaking their language.
Which brings us to the CSS Zen Garden. It is a project that challenges actual graphic designers to try their hand at customizing their page using CSS alone, and the results are astounding. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of what the guy’s over at PIE are doing, but nobody can show the true potential of CSS as a design layer quite like, well, designers.
Be careful over there though, it’s easy to lose an hour flipping through all the various designs. Here’s a few of my favorites:
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you feel that? its the CSS blowing right over my head
I think what minywheats is trying to say is that CSS Zen Garden isn’t as compliant as many people think. They’ve got a lot of non-semantic elements (spans wrapped around nothing) that were added preemptively (since the same HTML is used today that was used years ago when they created the site) to allow for maximum flexibility.