[jguffey]

I've long thought about this too. Eventually I've come to the conclusion that CSS Zen Garden was more about "Hey you can do all of this with pure CSS" than it was "You should do it this way". At the time that I discovered Zen Garden, CSS was in it's more early, primitive days. As a front-end developer, it was easy to say "I can't achieve this design without changing the HTML Structure". Zen Garden showed us that this was just an excuse, (just about) any design could be achieved without a requirement to fundamentally change the HTML of the page. It was eye-opening to see some of the ways theme authors rearranged content, broke down those box boundaries, and used design tricks that stretched the limits of CSS and HTML in that era.

It was awfully inspiring, and I think the point was never - "this is the way you should encode pages" it was more about taking excuses away.

[regularfry]

The point absolutely was "this is the way you should encode pages", or rather "this is what is possible if you encode pages this way". The purpose of Zen Garden was to highlight the separation between style and content; that separation is why we've got CSS as a separate language to HTML in the first place.

[jtms]

No, it was absolutely about the way you should "encode" your pages. I would choose the word "markup" here instead as that's what it is, but it was 100% a recommendation on the benefits of separation between markup and presentation.

[bluetwo]

Or, was it to prove that yes, you can live without Flash.