On Friday 17th June, I was lucky enough to go along to "The Making of the Garden", a talk by Molly E. Holzschlag, as part of the Brighton SkillSwap project.
SkillSwap is a scheme that’s been running in Brighton for about two years, and was set up by members of the Brighton New Media mailing list. The idea is simple: people volunteer to share their knowledge by giving a talk on their subject of choice. On this particular occasion, Molly, visiting the UK for the @media conference the week before, agreed to do a talk about the origins of the inspirational CSS Zen Garden, and also the book The Zen of CSS, which she co-wrote along with the Zen Garden’s creator, Dave Shea.
If you haven’t seen the CSS Zen Garden yet, the idea is this: use only Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), images and your imagination, to apply style and layout to the same XHTML page (the site’s homepage) to really show designers what’s possible with CSS. The Zen Garden was started in 2003, when Dave Shea felt that there was a real need to show designers that CSS gave them flexibility to create the web site designs that they wanted to. He opened the site up for submissions, and 170 designs later (just the accepted ones!), it’s still showcasing designs that illustrate new techniques, ideas and possibilities for CSS design.
Molly went on to show us the book, The Zen of CSS, which she wrote along with Dave Shea to examine the origins of the Zen Garden, and to highlight some of the technical and design aspects of 36 designs that have appeared on the site. I thought it was rather fitting that almost all of the communication between Molly and Dave whilst writing the book took place over the Internet.
Molly took us through several of her favourite designs, and the techniques used in creating and implementing the designs in CSS. One design that really stuck out was Prêt-à-Porter, which is a horizontal design, and uses the position:fixed property to keep an image on the left side of the screen even when scrolling across to the right side of the screen (unsupported in Internet Explorer, of course).
Perhaps unsurpisingly given the nature of the talk, discussion turned to web standards and business practices concerning accessibility, which was slightly tangental, but it was also nice to keep the talk more informal, and to have everyone contributing to the discussion.
After the talk, many of those at the talk went on to nearby bar, Grand Central. This was a great opportunity to talk to lots of like-minded developers, some of who I’d encountered before, and others I hadn’t. I had a great chat with Molly (who apparently "drinks like a Brit", which I wouldn’t argue with), and she showed enormous enthusiasm in some ideas I was discussing with her, which has certainly made me want to get on with it!
During the social, Paul (Watson) and I got talking to SkillSwap organiser, Andy Budd, about the kind of things we do at Psychology Press, and he took an interest in some of the e-learning stuff we’re doing. He even said that he’d like me to give a talk on XSL at a future SkillSwap meeting, which is an idea I’m becoming more and more keen on. It’d be great to give back at least a tiny bit to the web-development community who are always willing to share and have tought me a lot.
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