The CSS Zen Garden is a fabulous collection of CSS style-sheets displaying a wide range of visually tasty designs.

It has actually discouraged me from attempting some CSS stylings of my own. Partly because I know nothing I do will come close (I’m a hard-core tech … “art” is in engineering excellence ;)). Mainly, I am disappointed in the methods used to achieve the tasty designs – nearly everything I’ve seen is an image pasted over or under the content of the page.

I’ll pick on one, chosen nearly at random as an example: #104 “Invitation“. I think the font used for the main headings (h3’s) is quite nice, so I go digging in the CSS to see what font was actually used. Bad luck, it’s not a font, it’s just an image hacked into position.

CSS supports font specification and font downloading, but I have not been able to make it work and I am yet to see an example of it in use. I had great hopes for the CSS Zen Garden and was disappointed…

[I now can’t seem to find where in the W3C CSS spec where it describes font downloading – Perhaps I’m losing it. If it doesn’t exist, that would explain why no one uses it! :|]

[Update: Found it – it’s in CSS2: @font-face { src: url(…);} I guess I can forgive the Garden contributors given the restriction to mainly CSS1 usage :)]