Announcing the CSS Zen OPAC

It's time for a CSS Zen OPAC [1]. Remember the CSS Zen Garden [2], and how that changed your opinion of what's really possible with CSS? If you look around today, you'll see many libraries experimenting with slicker new user interfaces for their data (if you haven't seen any for yourself, see Ryan Eby's post [3], which is Solr [4]-specific, but there are also plenty of non-Solr projects doing the same thing, too). Right now, though, a lot of the experimentation is being done by us #code4lib types - usually systems folks comfortable with coding but not necessarily the best design eyes.

One thing we could do to push the boundaries further is a CSS Zen OPAC (Garden) - think about if the HTML sitting behind the CSS Zen Garden were an OPAC screen? Think about all the crazy ideas that might bubble up if we could throw a cleanly-designed, thoughtfully semantic-html OPAC screen up and let the world's best graphic designers and CSS gurus explore new directions and designs.

It's one thing just to have nice facet boxes, and clean record layouts, and helpful links and navbars and so forth. But we've all seen that now. What else could we do?

A side benefit of such a project could be converging on some semantic html patterns for OPAC markup - an OPAC macroformat, perhaps, or perhaps a handful of cooperating microformats.

Maybe we could change opinions of what's possible with OPACs. What do you think?