[locallost]

CSS Zen Garden is from a time when people still used tables and font tags to design their pages, and as such it was a pretty powerfull way to convince people there are better and more efficient ways to do things.

I think the important part here is "efficient". It is more efficient to go to a style sheet and change a color instead of 1000 font tags, but in other ways it's just more efficient and easier to adjust your template-generated html and be done with it. Or write it from scratch.

The thing that I think doesn't work very well with this way is reusability. Rarely do you have this one thing you've made, and that you can use in the completely same way in another place. So you end up adjusting the style through CSS for a specific case, which eventually results in having rules like .foo > .bar:not(.baz) :first-child and making a change there results in playing whack-a-mole: you change something, break it in another place, fix it there, now it breaks in the third place etc. This is even worse if you have multiple people doing quick fixes.

There are other reasons too, but in general all of that is fine if you want to do a one-off thing to see if it could be done. Especially if you're a designer writing the code yourself. But getting a finished design from somebody who doesn't care about code is different because you cannot really predict what people will think of -- and I've actually never seen anybody do a redesign like this.