Basically, a plug-in that once installed to your favourite text editor, lets you type shorthand that will then “expand” to real HTML simply by hitting a hotkey. Saving you precious of time!

I read about Zen Coding a while back and thought it was very interesting and powerful but didn’t really get into it because I was thinking that it made you lazy and may make you forget how to actually do HTML mark-up.

But there’s another side of it that I discovered.

Zen Coding is very closely linked to CSS syntax, especially how ’selectors’ are used. If you’re good at hooking into elements with CSS then using Zen Coding should be an ease. Using it can actually improve your CSS (to some degree I guess).

Anyway, it’ll be something I’ll be experimenting very soon.

Here are some useful links:

Excellent tutorial by James Scariati – An Introduction to Zen Coding
The official Zen Coding site where you can download the plug-in for various text editors