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What shitty fucking whiners you lot are. This is a fun technical experiment. It's clearly not advocating for some sort of production environment usage of pure CSS/single-div imagery in lieu of SVGs. It's a mental challenge and a fun "I wonder if" experiment.

Any of you busily shouting high from the mountaintops how this is useless and pointless and stupid and derf, don'tyouknowthisisn'tpractical should stop well short of daring to call yourselves engineers, and even shorter of calling yourselves creators, for a key tenet of a great engineer is occasionally looking at absurd challenges and seeing if they can make something happen.

I'm glad most of this trash has since been downvoted into oblivion where it belongs.



Counterpoint to "not practical": We have a dashboard at work that displays, amongst other things, the CI build status. For reasons I won't go into, we cannot change the HTML. We can change the CSS though, using Stylish. The "build failed" / "build succeeded" icons were incredibly non-obvious and developers weren't paying much attention to them.

Now, through a series of seriously horrendous CSS hacks, they display as really nice flat design green checks and crosses. Given that this dashboard only ever displays in literally one browser, on one big screen, it was completely acceptable to use CSS hacks to achieve the look I wanted.

It was sites such as this one that helped me figure out how to twist a single HTML element into what I needed. Particular shout-out to http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui-icons/demo/


Hear hear! A true hacker forum should applaud experimentation not nitpick at it. It helps us all to know the limits of client-side drawing by various means no matter if your site needs a Mario mushroom or not.


>a key tenet of a great engineer is occasionally looking at absurd challenges and seeing if they can make something happen

Sure, if that absurd challenge has some benefit to someone out there. This is not true for CSS-only artwork. There are no applications for this.




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