

CSS and the meaning of life (followup to CSS should not be used for layout) - lisper
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/02/css-and-meaning-of-life.html

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sc
His comments about the CSS Garden are extremely misguided: "But how much of
the loveliness is due to CSS and how much is due to photoshop is far from
clear."

The whole point is that every page of the garden is the same, HTML-wise. CSS
transforms each variation completely from the last.

~~~
lisper
But that in and of itself doesn't mean anything. The content is _static_. That
makes it much easier to prettify. Look for example at the Orchid example that
I linked to:

[http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/211/211.css&page=0](http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/211/211.css&page=0)

Look at the headings. They're really beautiful. How do I do that in CSS? I
can't. They are images.

To really demonstrate CSS you'd need to take all those style sheets and apply
them to a _different_ HTML document and see if they still looked good. No one
has done that experiment (and I suspect no one will) but I predict the results
would not look nearly as good.

~~~
sc
> Look at the headings. They're really beautiful. How do I do that in CSS? I
> can't. They are images.

But really, the whole point is that they _are_ doing that in CSS. The images
are defined in CSS; no "img" tags here. Browsers (and bots) that don't have
that CSS support gracefully degrade to indexable text.

The headings are also nothing special. Just the "Zapfino" font pre-rendered.
You could use CSS today and get it to work on every computer that has that
font installed (every Mac and iPhone, to name a few), or if the browser has
more experimental CSS support, you can render any custom font (with an open
license) by specifying a path to the font online. But alas, most browsers do
not support this, and we developers use sIFR instead.

> To really demonstrate CSS you'd need to take all those style sheets and
> apply them to a different HTML document and see if they still looked good.
> No one has done that experiment (and I suspect no one will) but I predict
> the results would not look nearly as good.

That's not the point of CSS.

~~~
lisper
> That's not the point of CSS.

Really? If that's true then either 1) CSS is useless for dynamic content or 2)
you have to dynamically generate your CSS to match your dynamic content. Which
is it?

