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CSS-Doodle

https://yuanchuan.dev/an-introduction-to-css-doodle

Always happy to see more tools for web-native generative art.

While I rely on Python/Cairo for heavier algorithmic brand assets, the immediacy of CSS for interactive patterns is hard to beat. The grid capabilities here look very robust for quick prototyping.

6 hours agoAxiomLab

This is very cool. I have no idea how this one work. I'm guessing most of the magic is in the box shadow?

https://codepen.io/yuanchuan/pen/OJRqGvz

18 hours agogandreani

Don't be fooled by the paucity of lines, that Codepen is of course pulling in an entire JS file: https://unpkg.com/css-doodle@0.34.7/css-doodle.min.js

If you inspect what's getting rendered, there's a sprite map expressed as a data URI that's doing most of the heavy lifting.

3 hours agolelandfe

Same

I don't understand how so few lines can produce so much different things.

And clicking on the background will just create a new random (?) background!

It seems that the aliases are doing a lot of work

16 hours agowiether

The aliases we're tripping me up! I almost understand it now. Not sure what the @lp is doing

16 hours agogandreani

As an aside but still relevant question, why is CSS preferred over JS when these days it can do lots of things like JavaScript and probably uses similar resources.

17 hours agosmusamashah

You can do layouts with javascript?

Couldn't imagine ever wanting skip grid and flexbox for whatever has been concocted up for JS.

16 hours agosoperj

multi-window interfaces in the browser... simulating a desktop, or other user navigable environment such as in a game or simulation, where a user my want to customize their environment beyond a grid snap.

14 hours agotracker1

CSS and JavaScript specialize in two very different areas and are commonly used in tandem

17 hours agoMinor49er

1. This isn’t CSS. It’s a declarative JS drawing framework with CSS flavor to the syntax

2. Without actual CSS JavaScript wouldn’t be of much use for drawing much of anything unless you were just going to use canvasses and forego the DOM entirely

13 hours agok33n

I agree. This seems like it would make more sense as a canvas library unless there's a use case I'm not understanding.

15 hours agosublinear

If I understand this, it’s all vector space. So it avoids one of the most irritating issues with working with canvas. I love not having to think about scale or resolution or aliasing.

5 hours agoWaterluvian

I think there is value in making it a declarative model

14 hours agojtokoph

Man, CSS looks absolutely nothing like it did when I started out. lol