Hours go by
Sometimes, I sit down to read the internet, and I'm done in 2 minutes. But other times, I start reminiscing on the days when I'd stay up all night programming or, I'll be honest, cutting and pasting design elements out of someone else's style sheets. (Ok, fine, really I'm just reminiscing about college and glossing over all the crap parts, like being forced to stay up all night to write worthless code just to prove that I understood object oriented programming. Blech.)
Anyway, the other day, I found the CSS Zen Garden. It's basically an HTML template of words, no tables, and you have to use CSS to lay out the page. I was amused for hours. Granted, part of the goal - laying out pages without nesting tables - seems more than a little silly to me. The other part, though - gaining control over the look and feel of the page independently of its content - was really appealing. I guess the two are more or less intertwined, but I still see a distinction. You can check out all the designs here. Be careful though - it'll tempt you to fire up dreamweaver and photoshop and start to "play" around yourself. Then many hours will wash by and you won't have much to show for it. At least, probably not something you'd show to other people!
Anyway, the other day, I found the CSS Zen Garden. It's basically an HTML template of words, no tables, and you have to use CSS to lay out the page. I was amused for hours. Granted, part of the goal - laying out pages without nesting tables - seems more than a little silly to me. The other part, though - gaining control over the look and feel of the page independently of its content - was really appealing. I guess the two are more or less intertwined, but I still see a distinction. You can check out all the designs here. Be careful though - it'll tempt you to fire up dreamweaver and photoshop and start to "play" around yourself. Then many hours will wash by and you won't have much to show for it. At least, probably not something you'd show to other people!