Ask HN: Quick Advice on CSS Zen Garden

2 points·theshire··2 comments

So I just discovered this pretty fantastic site. it seems like a well respected site on HN.

I'm still in process of learning CSS and HTML. How would you recommend learning from a site like this and what approach did you take?

Should I try and make some of the sites they have on there on my own? following the source code see if I can match the original designs?

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CSS Zen Garden is meant mostly as a testimonial of the effectiveness of well-written CSS without hacks, not as a reference of good web design or as demos of fancy techniques. What you should emulate is the natural, semantic markup of the pages, not the whimsical designs.

In their own words:

Where possible, we would like to see mostly CSS 1 & 2 usage. CSS 3 & 4 should be limited to widely-supported elements only, or strong fallbacks should be provided. The CSS Zen Garden is about functional, practical CSS and not the latest bleeding-edge tricks viewable by 2% of the browsing public. The only real requirement we have is that your CSS validates.

My random internet advice: if the exercise of building sites by following the source code seems interesting, go for it. Later, if it seems like you're not getting much out of it, stop. That's not advice specific to Zen Garden. You will always have some unique combination of experience and this might (or might not) be an interesting type of experience to acquire.

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