More specifically – because I think this is an aspect that has mostly been lost to time – when the CSS Zen Garden was first created, table layouts were still the norm and there was huge pushback from a surprisingly large number of developers who insisted that it was impossible to use CSS for nice-looking sites. The accusation was that CSS sites were all “boxy” and to get something nice-looking, you had to use table layouts.

It was pretty obvious even back then that they were just people who didn’t want to learn something new and they would not listen to anything pro-CSS at all. In fact, developers who insist LLMs are not useful for development remind me of them a lot.

Anyway, the CSS Zen Garden was released, and it seemed to shut everybody like that up overnight. It conclusively won the argument that CSS sites could look as good as table-based sites and could even do things the table-based sites couldn’t.