Values

The values driving Zen’s development are:

1. Creating novel, beautiful, well-formatted, semantic HTML and CSS should be dead simple.
2. Amateur web authors should easily create virtually any page structure and style.
3. The interface should have a virtually zero learning curve, and zero should mean zero. Zen must leverage well-known interface metaphors and gestures to the hilt. The “principle of least surprise” should be followed.
4. Zen should not clutter its interface for manipulating and creating semantic and presentation structure with every possible detail. Zen should hide details until they are needed; it is better to let the user drill down to these details than to present them by default.
5. The interface should have two mutually exclusive modes for semantics and styling. The semantics mode should hide page styling information and help search engines “understand” the page’s subject matter to classify it for the sake of web seekers. Styles will set fonts and colors and the interaction of the page’s elements with other elements and with the height and width of the page.
6. The interface should have two mutually exclusive modes: a semantics mode and a styling mode. The semantics mode should hide page styling information. The styles will set the looks of the page and the interaction of the page’s elements with such things as other elements and the height and width of the page. each other and the The clear and proper semantic structure will help search engines “understand” the page’s subject matter to classify it. The other mode should hide the semantics and focus on the look and feel of the web page. The look and feel is
7. Meta organization, like themes, templates, or partials,^{28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34} should not be precluded by the structure of Zen’s low-level tools. Zen should empower the creation of these, even if not directly implement them.