Dylan Schiemann

Being the elitest that I am, I like to poke fun at people who make the statement: “I designed this site entirely in css”. Recently, the designer of the newly launched mozilla store proclaimed that it was the first site he had designed entirely in css. Sure, CSS is a language used to describe presentational style, but you still need an html/xhtml/xml syntax of some kind to describe the content. Then the perverse thought occurred to me… what is the minimal amount of markup that could be used to develop a site? In Internet Explorer, because of its very loose rules, it turns out that you can define an entire web site with the following block of markup:

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />


Then, you simply set any css rule in the stylesheet that uses an expression to modify the dom of the document with the markup included in the css document. So really, you’re still using markup, and in this case JavaScript. However, because everything is in a stylesheet, you’d truly be designing a site entirely in css. If you have an idea for an equally useless trick in mozilla, please contact me.

P.S. No offense intended to Dan (you were just low hanging fruit) or to the mozilla store … in fact, I was wearing my mozilla shirt while writing this post. That’s almost as bad as wearing an In-N-Out Burger shirt to In-N-Out.