Going on record in support of this statement. Very, very, very tired of seeing this stuff. Please quit giving Upworthy titles to techniques or tools I will never, ever want to use any part of in practice. When I make something for fun or to try something novel, I still use the best techniques I find suitable for the problem. If it's really a pedagogical tool, it would have comments, built up examples, and conclusions about the paradigm in light of what was learned in the implementation. This is utter nonsense that reminds me of doing random things in middle school when it was quite plausible that any information was valuable information in light of a relative lack of experience to draw upon.
I think they're just fun little hacks. I personally find more interesting than the typical; "How sleeping only 20 minutes a day helped me sell my startup for 100 million dollars"
I suspect the community feels the same. There's always something beneficial that comes out of these for me. Whether it's seeing how *not to do something or picking up a little piece of code that can be repurposed somewhere else.
So you're never interested in seeing interesting explorations of CSS? Looking at the source for this didn't teach you anything interesting about new CSS features.
No-one is seriously suggesting we write CSS-only games. You're rather missing the point.
Whatever interesting CSS features this game contains could be applied to more practical use via a different sort of implementation -- in this case the reason is solely to get away with not having to write a line of JavaScript when clearly JS is a better way to write something like this.
It's one thing to write something that uses 30 lines of JS code only, than to create this and say "Look Ma, no JS!!"
I'm still slightly uncomfortable with css being able to do anything more than positioning, coloring and fonts... and maybe hover selectors though I did abuse those severely when I found out about them.
That is because the animation capabilities of CSS are still meant to be used for presentation purposes (like a cute response to mouse movement or a head bobbing around), rather than an all out game engine. The idea is still cute, but I freak that people will think this is the new way to design online games.
I share your practicality, but not your pessimism (nor the attitude which seems to think you can decree what others find interesting)
People going against perceived wisdom and doing the wrong things with the wrong tools is a great way to learn and innovate, I know CSS very well and I am fairly sure I wouldnt have been able to come up with this, it may not be the next big game engine but there definetely scope for very practical new techniques and insights from abusing tools in this way
Part of hacker culture is an appreciation for problems solved under arbitrary, weird, and usually difficult constraints. Practical this is not, but it's a cool demo that might inspire something useful.
If you lose that sense of playfulness with tech you might as well go work in some other field, because tech is about using things in ways they were never designed to be used... because it's fun first, and later because your under a weird constraint and you have this corpus of seemingly useless (at the time of acquisition) knowledge to draw on.
Things like this only promote a deeper understanding of what can be done in pure CSS. Yes he took it too far, but that's the point.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that others feel the same. In much the same way that you are very, very, very tired of seeing this stuff, I'm very, very, very tired of seeing this sort of comment on HN!
It could have been worst, imagine if the author instead had spent some of his precious time whining on a forum about how other people should spend their spare time on stuff he considers to be more valuable.
Hacking things to make them do something they were not designed to do is the life and blood of all things computers. It's just so damn fun.
What I find most hilarious in hindsight is that the parent poster, myself, and everyone in this thread except the article poster seemed to miss the first line about "ironic answer" yet we're all insisting that it was a serious example meant to really show off something awesome. I've seen some really out-there code that was really instructional, such as Urbit http://www.urbit.org/2013/09/24/urbit-intro.html, in spite of its admitted uselessness, but CSS transforms were all I expected to see and all I got.
Now that I understand the author's intent, it's furthermore impossible for me to go along with a narrative that every experiment has equal or potential to lead to some mind-rattling insight. If anything, the posts about how someday shaders might build entire games etc just demonstrate how, behind the wall of basic comprehension of how GLSL's inner workings and things like Chomsky grammar concepts create fundamental limitations, the barriers one will encounter are both insurmountable and undetectable. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
CSS itself has annoying limits that can be summed up with the existence of tools like LESS and Stylus that add expressions to generated CSS, giving us an infinitely more capable styling system, albeit still suffering from annoying limitations that keep me sour to many CSS uses. Quite simply, everything in CSS transitions has an API so far from how animation is dealt with programmatically that I find only the most basic utilizations to -ever- be appropriate. This doesn't even mention the fact of shims, fallbacks, and the JS that deals with them. The idea that we're "pushing limits", much less making progress with examples like this is not one I'm buying into.
Personally, I spend a lot of time in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This post was interesting to me because I was able to see the techniques that were used to accomplish what was going on in the snippet. What may not be relevant to you could be relevant to others.
