CSS Zen Garden seemed to have a message that you don’t need tables for everything, but it was astonishing how few of the featured designs ever handled responsive layout properly. Getting text to fit into a rectangle by cheating was very common and you’d see bleed everywhere at a different resolution.
Until flexbox, there was no way to fix this without resorting to table cell behavior. It ultimately soured me on the Garden. And thankfully I got to use CSS3 shortly after.
Keep in mind Zen Garden was written WAAAAAAAAY before mobile layouts were a thing. Back then, you had mobile sites .. for people with PalmOS, BlackBerry or flip phones with tiny browsers. I think my edition of this book came out before the first iPhone (I remember owning it when the girl behind me at work got the original iPhone EDGE), so responsive design wasn't a thing (I don't think media queries even existed in the CSS standard, or if they were, few were using them yet).
Heck, when the Zen Garden was first released, you couldn't even browse the web on a Blackberry. 1024x768 monitors were a luxury. 760px wide was all you could count on for a browser window once you accounted for window edges and scrollbars on the average user's 800x600 monitor (a few years later as 1024px monitors became more common, a 960px site width became the standard); and I had co-workers who were still getting by with 640x480.
I was fighting my coworkers with 1440 monitors to make sure we still worked on 768 width (plenty for 800px + scrollbar, or portrait on the brand new iPad). UI people like to maximize negative space in their mockups and it's not uncommon for them to use extremely short example text to emphasize that effect. Like how your living room looked so big until you put all of your crap into it.
And the thing is, even if you had a 16XX monitor, who wants to maximize a tool that you might be transcribing data in or out of? I might actually need two windows side by side to facilitate that work.
I was pitching responsive (or at least, fluid) design by 2011, and I was not blazing trails. I started using the iPad as an example but tiny laptops were an issue, and in a business setting, most production projectors were only 1024 pixels, hardly anyone had the 1280s, and the cheap ones were 800x600 native with terrible interpolation.
Wikipedia has this timeline:
> Cameron Adams created a demonstration in 2004 that is still online.[46] By 2008, a number of related terms such as "flexible", "liquid",[47] "fluid", and "elastic" were being used to describe layouts. CSS3 media queries were almost ready for prime time in late 2008/early 2009.[48] Ethan Marcotte coined the term responsive web design[49] (RWD)—and defined it to mean fluid grid/ flexible images/ media queries—in a May 2010 article in A List Apart.[2] He described the theory and practice of responsive web design in his brief 2011 book titled Responsive Web Design. Responsive design was listed as #2 in Top Web Design Trends for 2012 by .net magazine after progressive enhancement at #1.
And while the Garden was indeed around long before that, IMO it didn’t get properly cool until maybe ‘07. And once fluid and responsive came in it wasn’t keeping up.
The point, I thought, was to be able to send people there to learn, and I was afraid of having to fix that kind of smoke and mirrors in our production code so I stopped telling people about it, other than other seasoned UI people fora particular design, and half the time it was to laugh at one, not learn from it.
Wikipedia says the book came out in 2005, which if I remember correctly had plenty of colour pics inside. You don't get that kind of tech book unless you're already properly cool.
Responsive design was absolutely a thing, because the web was responsive from the start. It was CSS that made it non-responsive; sites that used tables for layout reflowed properly on PDAs or phones, and still do.
Virtually every CSS Zengarden site was filled with exact pixel counts and page offsets. As an art project it was neat, but practically speaking it was a disaster.
When I was first learning CSS I was trying to replicate a very easy 3 column layout where the middle column would grow and shrink with the screen and consist of multiple variable sized elements arranged neatly in a column. What should have been one of the most basic layout styles turned out to be quite a challenge to achieve with CSS. I wasn't even trying to have anything fancy like columns that disappear on super narrow screens. Just the most basic three column layout that didn't leave wasted space on the page. In my struggle to get it to work I went to sites like CSS Zengarden to figure out how they did it and was extremely disappointed to discover that they hadn't found the solution either. My thought was it couldn't be difficult because it was so easy to do with tables and literally everybody online was telling me that tables for layout were completely surpassed by CSS. Plus I was working with CSS 2, so any glaring deficiencies like this from CSS 1 would have definitely been fixed by then. I mean this was the point of CSS right? To do layout?
One of my big coups was fixing the reflow on our multicolumn layout. The page I fixed it on was survivable as it was, but a whole third of our UI would not have worked at all without it.
The first time I got to use flexbox in production (different project) I was happy as a pig in shit.
Oh man, I had blotted that out. There’s a somewhat arcane set of table styles that will give you proportional layout of blocks that is more powerful than colspan. I found that it was often worth the trouble of reaching for the more sophisticated solution.
Until flexbox, there was no way to fix this without resorting to table cell behavior. It ultimately soured me on the Garden. And thankfully I got to use CSS3 shortly after.