An iPhone, drawn entirely with CSS3 | Hacker News Reader

An iPhone, drawn entirely with CSS3

demos.jeffbatterton.com

39 pointsgrinich25 comments

There's a lot of these "x done entirely with css" posts as of late. It's cool, but not really newsworthy. Drawing stuff with CSS is the new ANSI art[1], I guess.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art

Except this is the type of thing the advances in CSS are meant for. It's not a creative hack. This is people exploring the bleeding edge. They introduce new and arguably better techniques for presenting content and I also think they serve as a good barometer for progress.

Did you read the source code? They're using 50 · elements as a speaker grill. That's about as close to ANSI art as you can get and still call it CSS.

My point is: With enough DIVs you can render anything in CSS (see examples below, including an entire animated Spiderman cartoon). Does it take artistic talent to draw something with CSS3? Sure. Is there lots of effort involved? Absolutely. But worth knocking something else off the front page for?

http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/web-development/p...

http://31o5.com/2010/05/05/doraemon-with-css3/

http://admixweb.com/demos/ipodcss3/

http://sxsw.beercamp.com/

http://jonraasch.com/blog/drawing-with-css

Also: isn't this what SVGs are for? Fast rendering, resolution independence... Drawing stuff with CSS3 is a cool hack, but I don't see the motivation for this from a practical perspective.

An iPhone, drawn entirely with HTML:

This project will only display correctly on a webkit browser

Can we honestly say this is any better than "this site will only display correctly on IE"? Even if they're using open standards, it just doesn't seem right to be incompatible with 90% of browsers. Is there any practical value of these demonstrations of CSS prowess to HN?

When the standards are widely implemented those who are already familiar with them will have a head start.

Unless some people push things forward they will forever stay the same. We don't all have to move in lock-step, that kind of thinking leads to watered down systems and is a recipe for stagnation.

There's also graceful degradation and progressive enhancement, where you can serve the best supported content to each client based on their capabilities. So you can use the new shiny stuff if supported but nobody is left out in the cold entirely. HTML5 video is a good example of this.

One last point. Other browser devs may see these demos and think "hey that's cool! we should be able to do that too", leading to quicker uptake of new standards.

Is it really going to kill them to add -moz-border-radius and -border-radius for every -webkit-border-radius?

It seems like that sort of stuff where you know it's already supported begs some action.

I didn't look at the code. If that's all it takes to get it working for Gecko as well then yes, shame on them for not doing so.

I agree it's kind of silly to put forth a visual web demo and exclude 90% of browsers (especially when these same effects can be rendered in all browsers, with the proper browser-specific tweaks), but does there need to be a practical value? I think the point is "Huh. Cool." Demoscene for CSS. These demos are also good for putting new features/techniques through their paces.

Is that 90% of browsers or 90% of users?

I think this kind of thing is like a light on the horizon for web designers. It lets us know that some of the things we wish we could do now are at least going to be feasible someday...

IE was different, just to be different (and to trash the standards). WebKit is different because it is on the bleading edge.

IE will at some point in the future catch up. IE 10 or 11 will probably be able to render this example correctly. Those sites that only works with IE depends on IE-quirkiness (aka bugs) which never will be implemented in any other browser.

So IE will catch up to this. Other browsers would never "catch up" to IE's weirdness. And IE never lead the direction of html development. WebKit does (e.g. transitions, 2D and 3D transformations, css animations).

I use these examples to show my customers that it is good to give users with advanced browsers a nicer design than what is possible (easy) with IE 6. That they should leave the idea that a website should look exactly the same in all browsers. That a sprinkle of css can improve a design in FF and WebKit, but would take huge amount of pngs in IE 6. Much more value for their money because adding a bit of css is much faster than fighting IE6.

IE 10 or 11 will probably be able to render this example correctly.

It won't. The demo uses -webkit-gradient, -webkit-box-shadow, -webkit-border-radius, -webkit-box-reflect, -webkit-transform, and -webkit-animation. Of course, it might be able to render it correctly when the "-webkit-" prefix is removed. But for now, demos like this are necessarily browser-specific.

Microsoft extension to rotate and scale <div>

div#id { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(sizingMethod='auto expand', M11=1.532, M12=-1.286, M21=1.286, M22=1.532); }

WebKit extension:

div#id { transform: rotate(40deg) scale(2.0); }

I think WebKit has the better candidate for a cross-platform standard......

It's just a clever tech demo, not your everyday online banking site where functionality is required. They could have even used Chrome 6 for all that matter.

It only works in chrome because of that http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465194

And here are the iOS icons in CSS 3: http://graphicpeel.com/cssiosicons

This is a great showcase for what's possible! I have slight graphic issues (harsh borders) on my iPad. Anybody experiencing the same?

>> This project will only display correctly on a webkit browser and has only been tested in Google Chrome.

Honestly, if you know it will display in a webkit browser, is it that difficult to at least test in Safari before you put the page up?

Or at least a lot easier than drawing an entire iPhone in CSS, I might add.

That's pretty cool, but everyone knows the second hand on the iPhone moves discretely with a little bounce rather than continuously!

Kidding aside, it'd be awesome to have a tool that converts images to their css equivalent if there would be space savings for that particular image.

Cool. For anyone wondering, here's that page in FF 3.6 and Opera 10.11:

http://imgur.com/R2Wod.png

That's because he's using -webkit prefix, it would probably work wit -moz prefix on firefox.

Looks like HTC touch, no?

2k of html, 20k of CSS, impressive!

When is firefox scheduled to be able to render things like that, will 3.7 do it?

Buttons don't work. Less realistic than reality. Lame.

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