Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leat­herman

Nursery Rhyme Code Poem [CSS]

October 27, 2007

Code Poems are fun! The trick is to take a nursery rhyme (but really, it could be any commonplace work of writing – Famous Speeches, Bible Verses, Famous Quotes, etc.), and then turn it into pseudocode. The code must follow both the programming or markup language you’re using and the rhyme as closely as possible. See how precise you can make your rhyme fit. I accept critiques and suggestions for improving me rhyme code (or you could just rewrite my rhyme as you see fit).

#theChurch {}
#theChurch #theSteeple {}
#theChurch .door[state="open"] .people { visibility: visible; }
#theChurch #theParson { display: none; }
#theChurch > .upstairs #theParson:active { display: block; }
#theChurch #theParson:lang(prayers) { display: block; }

The above code poem is released under the BSD license. To use in production environment without error, do not include an element with an id attribute of “theChurch”. Obviously I’m kidding, don’t use this code. Not even for enterprise software.

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. He measures website performance with speedlify and at one point became too fixated on web fonts. He has given 86 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Learn more about Zach »