Heck, I could write a long post about Zen Coding - but why not just let you see a vid that explains it, and shows some of its amazing features?
Check it out at Vimeo - Zen Coding v0.5.
As my xHTML writing tool of choice is Notepad++ (due to it having syntax highlighting for like, everything) I did a few googles to find a Zen Coding plugin for Notepad++. Chances are that your favorite editor also supports it, or that a plugin is available from the Google Code project.
Simply type in a string such as this one, which reflects
the hierarchy of html tags:
<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html lang="en-US"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title></title> </head> <body> </body> </html>
Then use the shortcut your editor uses to expand the Zen Code into xHTML (for the Notepad++ plugin that is Ctrl+E) and watch how, magically, you end up with full blown, indented markup.
[[showChunk?sc_name=`ex.17.first`]]
But that's not it! There's more! Do you also have the same markup layout structure of a container div, containing an inner container, then a header and content div? Does your header div have a logo img? No biggy!
body>div#container>div#inner>(div#header>img.logo)+div#content
transforms into
[[showChunk?sc_name=`ex.17.second`]]
You could literally build a whole page's basic structure with this in minutes... I'm in love.