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by sc 6338 days ago
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.
1 comments
lisper 6338 days ago
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

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.

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sc 6338 days ago
> 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.

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lisper 6337 days ago
> 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?

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