From the 2008 archives — a note on one of the classic CSS experiment sites, revisited in 2026.
CSS Play — experiments with pure CSS
CSS Play is Stu Nicholls’ long-running collection of experiments with Cascading Style Sheets — menus, layouts, and demonstrations built with (in his words) “JUST CSS”: no JavaScript and no other programming language in most of the demos.
When I first ran into it, I was less interested in finding anything applicable or pretty than in the great ideas it gave me for playing with CSS properties — things I honestly couldn’t believe were possible with plain element styling. It remains a good place to go if you want to understand what CSS can really do when you push it.
Nearly two decades on, the site is still live and still worth a visit: the demonstrations are dated in aesthetic terms, but as a study of how far markup and stylesheets can be pushed without a line of JavaScript, they’re hard to beat.