Slashdot Mirror
Homer Simpson Drawn With Web 2.0-Style ASCII Art
boogi78 writes "Remember ASCII art? This is the Web 2.0 CSS version of ASCII art featuring Homer Simpson. Here is a CSS G.W. Bush. There's also an program that automatically converts jpegs into 'CSS images,' but it's a Windows executable. I found no sources for it, but I got it to work with WINE."
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Original pouet thread which this spawned:
http://pouet.net/topic.php?which=5204&page=1
That's the most beautiful thing these eyes have ever seen....well except for Marge, when she wears that blue thing with the things.
So now using CSS and JavaScript is a criterion for "Web 2.0"? When will it end?
"And there be unix which have made themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake." - Matt. 19:12
pngtopnm | ppmtopgm | pgmnorm | pnmscale -width 80 | ppmtopgm | pgmtopbm | pbmtoascii
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Google cache. It doesn't animate, but the text-image is somewhat impressive.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Looks just like the block art from Prodigy from back in 1990's. All this tech and we're back to the same place as 1995.
Actually, this is a bit different - and much more unique and impressive, IMHO. I can't get to the first link (slashdotted already), but the Bush portrait and this Homer are both made using overlapping bits of various font characters, sized and colored using CSS, to make the curves and lines of the picture.
View source on that Homer "image" to see what I mean - the artist basically used font characters as a palette of vectors, and clipped out just the partial shape of each character that he wanted, using CSS properties.
As a result, instead of bloating to many MB, that Homer picture is only ~16KB. Bush is only ~32KB.
Translating pixels into an HTML table is not that interesting now.. I mean, I was excited when my brother wrote an app to do that about 8 years ago, and I even wrote a little companion app that parsed ANSI escape sequences and turned ANSI art into HTML tables too, but that was back then. :)
This, on the other hand, is really original and unique. I'm pretty impressed by it.
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If you think the blocky ASCII Dubya is bad, highlight his text. Holy crap.
The big advantage of this kind of graphic is that it scales up to a nice sharp anti-aliased image as the user increases the text size. Well, at least Homer did when I tried it.
But of course, properly implemented SVG would do that just as well. It just lacks the super-geekiness of using something in an unintended way to get a useful result. And, of course, this way might have better support in some browsers than SVG.
It needs Verdana from MS TrueType core fonts, so it doesn't work across multiple platforms. The link is slashdotted anyway. Here's a version that's still available: http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/
Here's how i see it: http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/9183/homeraz4.png
But of course! That's what Web 2.0 is all about: turning simple applications with a bit of necessary networking into unmanageably complex monstrosities requiring a full data-center and a plugged-up, memory-gobbling web browser to support one measly user and brought to life by the power of Great Cthulhu.
I fear that our advertising overlords will use this to display advertising that I'd otherwise block. The next step in fighting advertising on the web? Block all ASCII charaters from being displayed!!! That'll fix those advertisers.