Previous || Beginning of Primer || Next

Zen

The Everything2 Web site gives you quite of lot of control over how it appears on your screen. You can just accept the default appearance or you can select from a number of other 'skins’ or Everything2 themes. One notable theme is ekw, which allows you to modify parts of it to your own taste, and perhaps in the process realize how truly ugly you can make things if you try.

Now, there’s a new theme in town, and it’s called 'Zen’. Zen is different from the other E2 themes; it pushes your potential to control how E2 looks to the ultimate. Note I said ‘potential’ back there; this is something that you actually have to learn to do. But worry not; with a little determination, even sub-geniuses can become Zen Masters. You can also get ready-made Zen themes from your cooler friends.

Background

I’d like to interject here a long story about how the old ‘word processor’ wars and the Netscape and Microsoft browser wars screwed everything up and subverted the original elegant beauty of the HTML Web publishing model, but don’t worry, I won’t. Instead, here’s the gist: they took the properly separate aspects of content and presentation and put them into a blender with a bunch of stupid hacks and hit ‘liquefy’. The result is that HTML came to be used to control presentation as well as basic markup. You could not only say that this block of text is a paragraph, you could go on to set its margins, typeface, color and other aspects of presentation. Why is that bad? Well, it is not altogether bad. But let’s take a short sidetrack into the field of commercial publishing for some insight on a better way.

In the traditional publishing world, content and presentation are neatly separated. On the content production side of the fence, the writers produce plain text, copy editors make some changes, the graphic artists make pictures and stuff and the advertising companies do much the same sorts of things to make finished ads. Here, the content is the plain text, graphics and ads. On the presentation side, editors and layout guys decide the order of presentation and how the content is arranged on the page. They also decide on the style, size, color and other aspects of how each element of the content will appear. This is a good separation of duties and allows for a lot of efficiency and flexibility in the publishing process.

Back to Zen

The E2 Zen theme restores the proper separation of content and how that content is presented and gives you full control over the presentation part. With Zen, E2 gives you the content (in the form of HTML 4.0 transitional tagged text) and lets you decide where it appears in the browser window, how it looks, or even whether you see it or not. How does Zen do its magic? Simple. It let’s you write your own cascading style sheet (CSS). Huh? OK, Read on.

Previous || Beginning of Primer || Next