Homage to The CSS Zen Garden and the book that was a truly great co-author experience with Dave Shea. I learned so much from him and all the designers. Such progress for a declarative, meaningful, semantic, beautifully crafted #webdesign great years of optimism for us all it was.

I bought at least 5 copies of that book. Used it to evangelize Web Standards to F500 executives throughout New York. Had to keep buying copies because developers who borrowed it never wanted to give it back!!! A truly influential Web 1.0 text.

I'd call it at least foundational Web 1.5 or 2.0, because I remember those dark days circa 1995-2003 of tables and 1x1 transparent gifs because CSS either wasn't supported in enough browsers or it literally crashed them :/

pixel.gif was a core component of my personal dev library. I brought my own file with me along with my code templates. Because you couldn't trust just any tool to produce a transparent pixel instead of a white one. Dark times af.