Lessons Taught

The primary mission of the Zen Garden is to showcase what's possible with standards-based design, and browsing the various designs will provide a powerful display of the flexibility CSS offers. On its own, CSS is a design language meant to enhance a base markup language like HTML, XHTML, or XML. CSS1 was first introduced in 1996, with CSS2 following up soon after in 1998. Browsers began incrementally supporting both, and from 1998 on it became a standard practice for Web designers to control all of a site's typography through an external CSS file. That's about all that anyone did with it, until four or five years later.

There was a good reason why fonts were all you'd consider using CSS forthey were about the only thing you could rely on working across a variety of browsers. They didn't even work that well, but there was a distinct advantage to doing it this way that made a lot of designers use CSS anyway.

The advantage is that a single CSS file may be referenced by all documents on a site. If you set your typeface through a CSS declaration, all pages will apply it. If you change the font or the type size in that one file, all documents on the site will instantly recognize the change and your job is done.

This was a vast improvement over the prior method of working; the notorious <font> tag that came before was a document-level presentational element that had to be applied to every single instance across a site. You might end up with seven or eight <font> tags per page, across hundreds of pages. Changing the font was a time-consuming and painful process.

This type of presentational separation offered a small glimpse of the potential that CSS offers. A redesign was made orders of magnitude easier, as moving text from the old design didn't require hunting down and replacing thousands of <font> tags across multiple files; you just needed to copy and paste the content, then let your CSS do the rest.

But this is where common use rested for a long time. Older browsers with poor support for more advanced styling stayed around for years past their expiry date, and doing any advanced CSS work was simply impractical.

Finally, in the early years of the new millennium, the baseline support had improved to the point where full CSS layouts could be considered a valid choice. Browser support wasn't perfect (and it still isn't), but it was good enough to start considering CSS for more than just fonts. A few years of intense collaborative effort followed, with Web designers across the globe producing reliable methods for working with the style options available, techniques for building layouts with floats and the positioning model, and workarounds for browsers that weren't quite up to par.

And that's where we are today. There are browsers even now in 2005 that have problems with CSS2, which was finalized in 1998. But support is strong enough in general that the benefits of using CSS and standards-based design are tangible and paying off today for those doing so.

Let's take a brief look at those benefits. Chances are you're already aware of them since you're reading this book, but if you're interested in more in-depth detail, please consult the reading list in the Closing Thoughts section of this book.