2014-12-17

Something occurred to me the other day. <title> and <meta> tags are in the DOM so you must be able to style them like any other element. So I set up a really basic example and put a width, height and background on a meta tag and sure enough, a blue box appeared in my browser.

From there I thought what can I create using only a basic HTML5 boilerplate, kind of like an extreme version of CSS Zen Garden. So I started with this:

Then put my CSS skills to work.

It was absolute madness, everything I thought I knew about web design suddenly shattered. I gave a font-size to <title>, content to <meta> and a background image to <link>.

Here’s my end result:



And the CSS to go with that.

I did a 90s version too:



See the actual website for the full epileptic goodness.

CSS:

So is this going to change the way we do web design?

Well…no but I think it’s still a good exercise because it’s so constraining. You have to use every CSS trick in the book.

Give it a go yourself, start with the HTML above and see what you can create. Post back here if you make something cool, I’d love to see what’s possible.

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