Marzhill Musings

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

I took a look at an old favourite today. CSS Zen Garden still makes me awestruck. I am overcome by an urge to create something beautiful. Yet feel small when I compare my efforts to them. If you ever want to look at beauty on the web then just visit the above link. If you ever want to see what good designers can do with standards based tools then look at the above link. Maybe someday I will have a submission featured there. Who knows, stranger things have happened.

CSS is as much a part of WebApp development as javascript, html, or xml are. It is what gives you the power to put a face on your app. It makes standardizing the interface to your app easier and more comprehensible with it’s inheritance and cascading abilities. When you build you apps don’t forget the visual design or the visual designer. Give him the tools to create beautiful things. Like here.

As some of you noticed the site had some downtime. This occured because I was moving the server and had some problems with DNS and then Server Hardware. (More on that in a moment) I apologize for that if it caused you any trouble. I had been noticing a growing lack of space with my other provider, so I was looking for a different solution. It presented itself through work. My Boss actually gave me a server. Quad Pentium II processors 2 gig of Ram and 30 gigs of Raid 5 disk space. He also offered to allow me to host it off his T1. All he asked was that I set up a place for the other employees to host their own websites too. This was perfect. I had a decent server with enough space to grow into and full control over the configuration. It was like having something from ServerBeach but without the cost. I look forward to using the server as a development platform to work on some experiments in Web Application development I have had in mind for some time. I hope you will enjoy my chronicling those experiences here.

Unfortunately when I got the server started I was unaware that the scsi cable had a problem. It ended up trashing the raid container and I had to rebuild. This meant that after the DNS had replicated the site was down completely since the server went down. Luckily I was able to rebuild and we are now running debian sarge with everything I need to be a webhosting provider to my coworkers, immediate family, and myself.

Software Development on the Web is undergoing a revolution. We’ve had the ability to build responsive, useable, dynamic applications for quite a while now. But no one has capitalized on it. No one has been building those applications. Most web developers are still stuck in the WebPage mode of design and not the WebApp mode of design. Thankfully, companies like Google are starting to give the WebApp design philosophy some high profile attention with apps like Gmail and Google Maps. So what exactly is the difference? There are a number of radical differences between WebApp and WebPage Design modes. Each has a use in website designing.

Webpage Design is about presenting information. It focuses on making the content readable, understandable, and locatable. Reference sites, and online literature sites do well with this design philosophy. Blogs are another instance where the WebPage Design philosophy works well.
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WebApp Design, on the other hand, focuses on responsive, dynamic, realtime action. Sites that allow the user to do something benefit the most from this approach. The Administration front ends to Reference sites, a WebMail site, and Online Game sites are all excellent candidates for the web app approach to design.

Elements of these approaches to design are now getting combined in interesting ways. Google’s autocomplete feature is one example. A melding of the two can only be beneficial to Web Development trends. In future articles I will be talking about some of the technologies that make these trends possible.