Why these Standards?

The W3C working groups involve individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds and specialties who meet to address ahead of time the issues an average Web designer should never need to worry about. The goal is to provide a series of recommendations so well thought-out that simply by following the specification properly, developers of authoring software and browsers have a clear guideline to follow, and content authors and designers can be assured that their sites are viewable and usable by the widest variety of user agents.

By "user agents" we mean Web browsers, of course; but the average desktop browser is only the tip of the iceberg. As portable devices like mobile phones take off, more and more users will browse the Web free of the shackles of the desktop. Not every user will come in using your browser of choice; not every user can. For example, those with special accessibility requirements may use assistive devices called screen readers, or special Braille displays or magnification software.

Because the design goal of these W3C-created specifications was to clear up the incompatible mess of the Web of the 1990s, it would hardly make sense to serve different versions of the same site to all these different user agents. So the recommendationswhich include HTML 4.01, XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the DOMwere designed with all this in mind.

These were the technologies that designers and coders within the Web Standards Project embraced. It was logical to support specifications that would guarantee the widest content accessibility, while allowing for precise visual control. CSS fit the bill, but it was a completely new way of building Web sites. Convincing other designers that it was in their best interest to learn CSS proved to be the challenge, and the first few years of the new millennium were spent figuring out exactly how to use it.

This was the climate of the Web when the idea for the Zen Garden was planted. The people who were working with CSS at the time tended to be coders and programmers; they were highly adept at figuring out the technical issues when implementing CSS, but the layouts they produced were often considered minimal, bland, and uninspiring. Graphic designers hadn't latched on to the idea of using CSS, because there weren't any exceptional examples of CSS design.