CSS Zen Garden

This is a must-see for anyone who wants to know what CSS is truly capable of—it's simply amazing.

It just blows me away how every design uses the exact same HTML for structural markup only—the entire layout and appearance comes from cues in the cascading style sheets!

CSS Zen Garden
Go there prepared to be awed and inspired.

Check out this intro done entirely in dhtml... looks like flash.

http://www.getelementbyid.com/

That's a great resource, especially if you're looking to get into table-less designs!

I stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago, and was amazed at how much the same layout can change simply by changing the CSS code!

Zen garden has been updated - http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/

yeah, CSS Zen garden blows me away. It really got me interested into CSS table-less designs and showed me what CSS can make. Up until now all my designs have been made with HTML tables but I'll definitely be looking into CSS now.

Very nicely done... Does anyone know, is there anything similiar to CSS? (I haven't done stylesheets yet)

What do you mean is there anything similar to CSS? As far as I know, there aren't any other similar standards except maybe XML, which would still use CSS for the transformations (I imagine).

I was asking if there was anything that does things like CSS... kind of like DHTML, yanno?

Wow, that site is amazing.

Well, DHTML is sort of a combination of CSS and javascript. Otherwise, there's Flash, I guess.

To clarify a bit, if you're asking about whether or not there are other open Web standards that do things comparable to what CSS accomplishes, I don't know of any other than perhaps XML, which in general Web use isn't going to gain you much that CSS doesn't already do (to my knowledge).

If you're asking about whether or not there are other ways of displaying things in cool ways that are possible with CSS, I'd say there are plenty of ways, ranging from doing nifty Photoshop work to using Flash or SVG to create interactive applications and interfaces.

When I posted my original reply, which in retrospect probably came across as a bit snappish (sorry about that), I wasn't sure which question you were asking. I think you're really sort of asking a combination of the two questions, and my answer is that Flash or SVG are the only things that'll currently do what DHTML (using CSS and javascript) can do.

dhouston, what do you mean by XML and CSS being comparible? CSS is used for styling data, XML is used for storing it. Yes, they are both open standards, but that's about all they have in common. Isn't it?

You can write a page in XML and write transformations to render the XML for the Web. I had an example I was going to point you to (well, http://www.kuykendall.org/phpgroupware/ -- click on the "Demo can be seen here" link), but it's not loading as it did the other day, hopefully only temporarily.

Basically, if you get in and view the source on this guy's pages, it's straight XML. He's got his transformations (or whatever the appropriate terminology actually is) in another file, and they essentially apply CSS to the XML tags to format the stuff for the screen. The XML data could presumably also be used within other contexts, for example to convert the site to Word or PDF using other transformation definitions.

Great explination I'd like to know more about what you guys know about this, CSS was something that I was thinking about implimenting on my site (before I had to stop development work on it, because of work that is...) and I don't know much about any of the styling methods...

So to expand just a smidgin more, stumpy, I suppose it's more proper to suggest XML as a replacement for HTML rather than as a replacement for CSS, as CSS, or a similar standard, can be applied to both organizational standards.

Nicat, I don't think there's any better thing you can do than to download the HTML and various instances of the CSS for different, wildly divergent, designs at csszengarden. The HTML's always the same, of course, and you should get a pretty good primer on CSS by digging through the CSS definitions found there. I've also found the CSS (and js) reference at http://www.devguru.com to be very handy.