Mona Lisa in pure CSS(codepen.io)

240 pointsby jmduke14 tahun yang lalu88 comments

http://codepen.io/jaysalvat/pen/HaqBf

96 comments

phoboslab14 tahun yang lalu

And here I am, upvoting the thread because I thought it's a statement about how ridiculous all the 'X in pure CSS' posts have gotten, while everyone else in this thread seems to be genuinely impressed.

lowboy14 tahun yang lalu

At least it's better than X in pure HTML5.

grimlck14 tahun yang lalu

And that is better than the X in pure javascript posts, with X being something which was impressive 10 years ago in other languages

egeozcan14 tahun yang lalu

...doing the same in a more restrictive environment (in this case, browser) is always an accomplishment.

novalis14 tahun yang lalu

Conflating positive fruition with positive value is just a positivistic error. That would mean that any fruition is beneficial by default. Unless someone made "logic in css". It doesn't stop others from having a valid pov because a made b in a more restrictive c env.

Having said that, I like all the Mr Doob stuff and most openGL demo stuff coming out.

[deleted]14 tahun yang lalu

skrebbel14 tahun yang lalu

It's even more ridiculous once you realise that data: URLs work in CSS.

Thus, I hereby present to you, the Mona Lisa in pure css (!!), using even fewer bytes!

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/gnqlc

notum14 tahun yang lalu

Why not go oldschool?

Behold: Mona Lisa in pure html (!!), because more bytes is better.

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/lJxAe (may crash browsers)

jere14 tahun yang lalu

Jeez.

If your underlying method is pixels, you can render any image you want. I'm afraid I'm missing the "hack" here.

[deleted]14 tahun yang lalu

suyash14 tahun yang lalu

that is the hack....I know it's kinda stupid or awesome..depends how you look at it...but pixel by pixel..we can draw anything!

jayflux14 tahun yang lalu

I agree, I was expecting some CSS hackery.

But this is nothing more than using CSS for pixels. With that logic you could theoretically create anything.

josteink14 tahun yang lalu

So... It's a bitmap-image written in CSS boxshadows. It's a bitmap written in text.

The resulting CSS is 247KB. Taking the same image and saving as a JPG (which I think is fair, since it's fairly blurry) results in a 40KB file. That's more than 6 times smaller.

If you scale it down to the detail level found the CSS (each CSS-"pixel" being a 4x5 unit) even a PNG will easily beat it at 24KB. Here the JPG also clocks in at 6KB.

So I don't get it. Using CSS, using a text-format to encode bitmaps has always been and will always provide subpar results. Ok. So it can be done. We know that. It has been proven times and times again.

Apart from that: What's the point?

dandelany14 tahun yang lalu

It's just a hack. You're on Hacker News. If you don't like it, don't upvote it.

This reminds me of when I brought a friend of mine to Maker Fair in NYC last year... We were surrounded by a strange amalgamation of weird gadgets and "art", and sometimes the line between the two is not always so clear :) The entire time we were there she kept asking "but what is it FOR?!" or "but who would WANT a thing like that?". I've always found myself asking questions like "ooh what does it do?" and "what can I learn from it?"

josteink14 tahun yang lalu

Sure. It's a hack. I get it. Hacks are cool. But this is a hack which has been posted a million times over and over the last few months.

At some point the novelty wears off and IMO this one is way past due.

Apart from that, I was asking if there was anything else I was missing. From the responses I got, it seems the answer is "no".

hk__214 tahun yang lalu

Even the gzipped version is 49kb.

TazeTSchnitzel14 tahun yang lalu

I was going to say this sort of thing would be useful on reddit for subreddit stylesheets, but they allow uploading images. So there's no practical application at all.

steffanwilliams14 tahun yang lalu

There is a generator on Codepen that allows you to do this, that probably deserves more praise: http://codepen.io/blazeeboy/pen/bCaLE

suyash14 tahun yang lalu

True, how cheap that the author is trying to take full credit as shown on his codepen example: /* Mona Lisa with pure CSS Pointless but fun!

  By Jay Salvat
  http://jaysalvat.com

TazeTSchnitzel14 tahun yang lalu

Warning: Loading a large (e.g. 1920x1080) image will grind your computer to a halt as it fills up paged memory.

pan6914 tahun yang lalu

About ten years ago I made a converter application that converted a image (jpg/png/gif) to an HTML table. The result at the time was great. Unfortunately the generated HTML was quite verbose so it took a lot of bandwidth to download. I guess a similar conversion program has been used here and it seems that CSS these days can take off quite a bit of fat of that generated code.

PS: Forgot to mention. The reason I wrote the converter at the time was as an experiment to avoid people from right-click and saving images.

cup14 tahun yang lalu

While some websites stop people from right clicking and saving (such as flickr) you can get around that by just screen printing. So why would you invest time in trying to stop one route of copying when there is a second unstoppable?

jere14 tahun yang lalu

>So why would you invest time in trying to stop one route of copying when there is a second unstoppable?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

Good question. I'd like to know also.

On another note, let's be honest. A lot of people today don't know print screen. I'd say the majority. But 10 years ago? That image to table conversion must have been a bank vault.

Scottopherson14 tahun yang lalu

Clients.

cup14 tahun yang lalu

Would it not be easier to explain to them that what they're asking for is impossible to deliver?

gsteinb8814 tahun yang lalu

Sometimes, yes. Frequently it's very difficult to explain to a client that the way you[1] interpret the words they[2] are using is rather different than what may be in their head.

That is, from the technical perspective it may be 'impossible' to achieve perfect DRM. But from another perspective, if the added cost of circumventing that DRM is large enough that most[3] people won't bother, it /may/ be a success. See: Steam.

In short, the language/terminology barrier between people in different fields results in a lot of client/developer miscommunication, frustration, and, frankly, poor results.

A rather complete discussion on this (w/r/t a client wanting 100% uptime): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056414

[1] The technical party in the relationship

[2] The party paying someone you to handle the technical side

[3] Again, we run into a problem with precise definitions using 'most' - do we mean 99.9%? Do we mean enough that the cost of implementing the DRM is larger than the $ saved. Though the lost sales due to /having/ DRM is an entirely different discussion.

petsos14 tahun yang lalu

Probably not.

yozmsn14 tahun yang lalu

See the thing is that often at least for me when I want to save a picture it's because I like it and want to use it as a background, the trouble with printscreen is that it only captures the picture at your screen resolution not the photo's resolution so you end up with a grainy unusable image... if someone goes through the trouble of making a picture uncopyable I give up immediately, it's just not worth the hassle.

iSnow14 tahun yang lalu

Uhm, doesn't this spur your ambition?

With something like firebug installed, it takes about 20s to find "div#main-photo-container>noscript" holding the image on flickr in all it's glory.

Edootjuh14 tahun yang lalu

Or select the picture and copy it to the desktop.

bennny14 tahun yang lalu

xutopia14 tahun yang lalu

Screenshot?

borplk14 tahun yang lalu

Yeah good old times. I did exactly the same thing although not that long ago. It turned amazingly well (although yes no matter what you do the size will be higher than the original image) but the quality was identical. You can use a very small font with the ASCII square character which basically gives you pixel perfect images.

cousin_it14 tahun yang lalu

If you want to stop people from right-clicking and saving, why not just cut the image into 16 smaller images? That would also make right-clicking and saving more difficult than screen-printing, so there's no point doing anything more advanced. For even more entertainment value, you could make the pieces irregular shaped, with transparency :-)

corwinstephen14 tahun yang lalu

The best part about this is that now I know that the box-shadow property can take multiple arguments. The more you know...

jgv14 tahun yang lalu

7 thousand of them

dpham14 tahun yang lalu

bet you there's a limit. 65536 maybe?

joshj1914 tahun yang lalu

Probably browser dependent. Edit: unless W3C mentioned something about it.

seanlinehan14 tahun yang lalu

Me, in 60,000 lines of pure CSS: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/ItbEm

If anybody wants to take a gander at my very slow PHP code, it's here: https://gist.github.com/3831235

Anybody have any optimization tips?

kevsamuel14 tahun yang lalu

A friend of the guy did even crazier, a animated nyan cat (including the annoying music) with only one html tag, and thousand lines of CSS ^^

http://codepen.io/JBay1337/pen/Ejtfl

Webkit only though

It started kinda supidly over a beer yesterday with the joconde guy, then one friend posted a 50 mo animated nyan cat, I posted a 22mo version, and we kept iterating until he won.

His last version is kinda smart: it uses css keyframes like divx use video keyframes, with diff in between. Almost the first css video codec :-p

tlrobinson14 tahun yang lalu

We get it, you can draw anything in "pure CSS".

RKearney14 tahun yang lalu

Not entirely. This also requires HTML.

lowboy14 tahun yang lalu

You know, I was going to write that it was a given since CSS is applied to a markup language so you need some sort of markup, and that you were being pedantic.

But then I thought it would be neat if someone were to make the Mona Lisa as ASCII art using only valid CSS, thus rendering a truly pure CSS version. I guess you could further argue that it isn't pure CSS because it also involves something to display the text.

______14 tahun yang lalu

You don't need HTML at all. Using pseudo elements and taking advantage of browser assumptions you can make HTML-free webpages:

http://css-tricks.com/using-css-without-html/

lowboy14 tahun yang lalu

The example doesn't work for me on Chrome stable, Win7. So looks like we need some markup.

darkstalker14 tahun yang lalu

Works for me on Firefox 15 (linux)

kd0amg14 tahun yang lalu

And apparently, "This Site Totally Doesn't Work Without JavaScript."

mukhabbat14 tahun yang lalu

As pan69 said this technique isn't new! I've experimented this but I don't like it, it's heavy for coding images. It's good for smaller codes like http://codepen.io/joshnh/pen/ohbHl

diggan14 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, smaller code... Only 2000 lines for something you can do with 2 or 3.

nowarninglabel14 tahun yang lalu

It's a bit disappointing that a project which is supposed to show me something in "pure CSS" is hosted on a site which gives me a big warning/block that the site "doesn't work with out javascript, like at all".

diggan14 tahun yang lalu

Codepen is just a viewer and editor for HTML, CSS and Javascript.

andrus14 tahun yang lalu

Cool hack. It would be neat if the box-shadows used relative units rather than `px` so that you could resize the result, but then why not use SVG?

jtreminio14 tahun yang lalu

http://codepen.io/anon/full/FHqiE

eranation14 tahun yang lalu

What would be nice is the source code of the code generator that did that CSS so everyone can post tomorrow their favorite image in pure CSS...

raldi14 tahun yang lalu

How do you know he didn't draw it by hand?

eranation14 tahun yang lalu

I don't, I just know I wouldn't

seanlinehan14 tahun yang lalu

https://gist.github.com/3831235

eranation14 tahun yang lalu

Did you just find it, or wrote it right now? either way, this makes the point of the top voted comment even stronger.

seanlinehan14 tahun yang lalu

I wrote it after seeing the thread.

It's a pretty simple technique, but it's intensely resource heavy. If the op (or anybody) wrote a script that does this algorithmically to produce as few drop shadows as necessary while maintaining quality... Well, then I'd be thoroughly impressed.

Regardless, this clearly struck a chord with some people so I say cheers to the op! Easy or not, he did it, did it well, and captured peoples' wonder.

elliotlai14 tahun yang lalu

I want a Ecce Homo version of this please ><

vidarh14 tahun yang lalu

And the price for most horrible abuse of box-shadow goes to....

(Nice hack, though; didn't know box-shadow could be abused that way)

[deleted]14 tahun yang lalu

kidh014 tahun yang lalu

Seems that everybody that has plenty of time, a little bit of talent and knows this tool http://kushagragour.in/lab/picssel-art/ can make something like that

[deleted]14 tahun yang lalu

ftwinnovations14 tahun yang lalu

So is there just an app making these types of things at this point? I'd have to imagine so... And if that's the case it's about as impressive as a generated ASCII art Mona Lisa.

s_m14 tahun yang lalu

Almost certainly. You could probably do this in about twenty lines of PHP, it's just a map of pixels from an image into CSS pseudo-pixels.

gavinpc14 tahun yang lalu

If I had a thousand dollars for every HN post that works in Chrome and not Firefox, I'd feel somewhat better about what that suggests.

woah14 tahun yang lalu

Yea, I'm a designer, I use chrome- you know why? The inspector is a lot better. The firefox inspector is sure sexy but it is simply not very powerful. Yea, there's firebug, but chrome has a very powerful set of tools built right in. I can amaze people by redesigning a page on the fly- as long as I don't accidently refresh.

gavinpc14 tahun yang lalu

I like Chrome, too. But I'm not ready to see Firefox abandoned. My hope is that the demo projects I've seen here are just bleeding-edge experiments that people were too excited about sharing to bother with the grunt work of browser compatibility.

iSnow14 tahun yang lalu

Works just fine here in FF 15 - and even looks better than in Chrome, because the stripey distortions are missing.

vacri14 tahun yang lalu

I've always said that recreating the Mona Lisa is the 'Hello World!' of the art community. Curious to see the two combining like this.

enos_feedler14 tahun yang lalu

I thought Lenna was the Hello World of the art community. Or is that the image processing community? :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

[deleted]14 tahun yang lalu

Fletch13714 tahun yang lalu

The script that generated the CSS is far more impressive than the image itself, would definitely like a look at that.

aw3c214 tahun yang lalu

for each pixel coordinate and color, output an offset and color. Not sure how it is impressive.

diggan14 tahun yang lalu

How big would the CSS-image of Mona Lisa be compered to a "normal" image with the same resolution and pixel density?

jimmyhwang14 tahun yang lalu

Amazing job! How long did it take and were there any tools you used to make this faster?

borplk14 tahun yang lalu

It's simpler than you might think. Takes less than 20-30 lines of Python. Read the pixels in the image and for each pixel print some parts of the box-shadow CSS with the right numbers... done.

acjohnson5514 tahun yang lalu

No big deal. Let me know when you can do it using VIM syntax highlighting and ASCII

dj2stein914 tahun yang lalu

The Da Vinci's of the future will use HTMLx and CSSx instead of paint and canvas.

jameshsi14 tahun yang lalu

i actually like this better than the other "pure CSS" examples i've seen. in a sense, i think of this as an interactive lesson to illustrate a box shadow hack that could conceivably be useful

lsh14 tahun yang lalu

"This Site Totally Doesn't Work Without JavaScript."

Pure CSS my arse.

masonlee14 tahun yang lalu

"Of course, it's not handcrafted" LOL

epascarello14 tahun yang lalu

More bytes for a pixelated look!

brownBananas14 tahun yang lalu

Better version of Mona Lisa:

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/zbcJq

leecGoimik714 tahun yang lalu

Doesn't work in Opera 12.

christianblais14 tahun yang lalu

But... why?

javajosh14 tahun yang lalu

Extremely clever!

jgv14 tahun yang lalu

this is insane

bashzor14 tahun yang lalu

Oh come on... Let me make you one in HTML4.01! Or HTML5! Or Javascript!

Pixel by pixel... seriously.

derleth14 tahun yang lalu

It's in 'pure CSS', yet it requires Javascript.

fuddle14 tahun yang lalu

Disgraceful!

pshirishreddy14 tahun yang lalu

christianblais14 tahun yang lalu

ejpastorino14 tahun yang lalu

amazing!!!

zawaideh14 tahun yang lalu

wahhh! box-shadow can do that?! Crazy!