Sort of to show off, but also simply the very artsy reason of seeing what you can come up with when restricting yourself. Or to quote from the corresponding Mozilla Hacks article (link to which can be found in the page source):

    But why a single div?

    When I was learning to paint, my class did these color mixing exercises where we created the many colors of the spectrum from only the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. The purpose of the exercise is to learn the behavior of the medium and the constraints show us the power of combination. You can certainly buy green paint, but you can also create green from blue and yellow. Restricting your available options forces you to re-evaluate the tools you already have.

    I decided to start a CSS drawing project, every few days illustrating something new with only CSS. To further challenge and explore what CSS is capable of, I gave myself the constraint of using only a single div in the markup. Instead of buying green paint (or adding another div), I’d need to stretch and combine CSS properties to achieve my goals.