Coding creative designs has always been difficult using CSS alone. Until recently, the language itself has been quite restrictive in terms of the visual effects you can use. Re-creating the visual effects from graphics editing packages like Photoshop was difficult, if not impossible, and regularly required nasty hacks.
We have always been able to work around these constraints by sacrificing simplicity (extra elements purely for presentation purposes) or performance (pages too heavy on images, JavaScript to do visual effects).
In this chapter we will ...
