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 modes. One mode should hide page styling information to focus on the semantics or purpose of each section of the page. The other mode should hide the semantics and focus on the look and feel of the web page.
6. 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.