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.
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?