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Social Networks Programming Games

'CSS Crimes' Turn Social Media Posts Into Games (theverge.com) 22

Alexis Ong writes via The Verge: It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you build something on the internet, people will find ways to creatively break it. This is exactly what happened with cohost, a new social media platform that allows posts with CSS. Digging through the #interactables hashtag on cohost reveals a bounty of clickable, CSS-enabled experiments that go far beyond GIFs -- there's a WarioWare mug-catching game, an interactive Habbo tribute, magnetic fridge poetry, this absolutely bananas cog machine, and even a "playable" Game Boy Color (which was, at one point, used for a "GIF plays Pokemon" event). Yes, there's also Doom. The cohost team embraced the madness. It was the beginning of a creative avalanche that simply isn't possible on other social media sites -- a phenomenon that the cohost community has since dubbed "CSS crimes."
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'CSS Crimes' Turn Social Media Posts Into Games

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    "Funny how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does."

    • Perhaps there is a modicum of confusion on the observation between worse and different. Our lives on dealing with the nature of reality is a construction of assumed probabilities and when those assumptions are challenged by an unexpected reaction, we assume that is life becoming worse rather than a correction of a wrong assumption. That that correction might be tragic is merely a normal educative process that we must change or suffer the consequences.
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday August 04, 2022 @07:29AM (#62761574)

    When style sheets are executable enough to port Doom to...

    The people who designed the Internet and the initial WWW were inspired engineers. The following generation who had a go at turning it into web-two-oh by slapping mountains of code on top of it to make it do something it was fundamentally not designed to do, not so much.

    • The people who designed the Internet and the initial WWW were inspired engineers. The following generation who had a go at turning it into web-two-oh by slapping mountains of code on top of it to make it do something it was fundamentally not designed to do, not so much.

      By definition, they were hackers.

    • by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Thursday August 04, 2022 @08:44AM (#62761682)

      never trust headlines. this is all done with good old http 1.0 elements "img" and "a" (basically get requests), url redirects, and there is actually server code involved.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      that said, yes, http could see a rebirth and css was a total clusterfuck on top that has just gotten worse with time. allegedly css should have helped separate presentation and content layers and provided semantic categorization of components but actually did completely the opposite as developers immediately abused it to squeeze logic into the presentation layer with utterly bizarre (and ironically meaningless) semantics.

      • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

        ... allegedly css should have helped separate presentation and content layers and provided semantic categorization of components but actually did completely the opposite as developers immediately abused it to squeeze logic into the presentation layer with utterly bizarre (and ironically meaningless) semantics.

        From my experience, this comes from designers (not developers) not giving a FUCK about semantics and only caring about what looks good in a specific instance in a specific spot.

        • How could they? CSS wasn't made for designers. Designers either need to be multidisciplinary or they need to hand off mockups to engineers. Semantic design is not just a pretty picture.

      • allegedly css should have helped separate presentation and content layers and provided semantic categorization of components but actually did completely the opposite

        Anybody with a brain knows that people who make web pages don't actually know what any of those things are. They don't plan, they just hack away at it and put stuff wherever it seems to work.

        It's the same reason C is still around as a language. C++ needs some formal studying to get on the right path, C doesn't.

        • by narcc ( 412956 )

          It's the same reason C is still around as a language. C++ needs some formal studying to get on the right path, C doesn't.

          This doesn't make the point you think it does. This implies that C++ is unnecessarily complicated, which is a bad thing.

          Programming languages exist to make programming easier. That is their primary purpose. If a language makes programming harder, then the language is a failure.

          • What I really should have said is that Object Oriented programing isn't intuitive to beginners. There's an initial learning hump to overcome but if you dont make that effort then you're doomed to write C forever.

            • by narcc ( 412956 )

              Doomed? A lot of us prefer to work in C.

              • Doomed? A lot of us prefer to work in C.

                I can't imagine you write anything important/large.

                And yes, we know you CAN do it, but why would you? What's good about using strdup/strcpy/malloc/free and constantly reinventing linked lists, etc.?

                • by narcc ( 412956 )

                  Just because you don't know how to use it effectively, doesn't mean the rest of us don't. I, and many others, really don't need the ungodly mess that is C++.

    • The people who designed the Internet and the initial WWW were inspired engineers

      I'm pretty sure that for example Alan Kay criticized even "the initial WWW" for its uninspiredness.

    • HTML5 and CSS are massive improvements over the "original web". If anything, modern web programming requires much less code to create a much better, more coherent result. Christ, do you not remember Geocities or Angelfire? This article is highlighting the madness of allowing users to provide their own CSS, which surely is madness when Markdown does everything you should ever allow a user to do.
    • I thought when I read about a proof a professor did that CSS was Turing complete it would be less than a year before somebody ported Doom to it... It took longer than a year and this "port" doesn't look like it is legit as it runs from a server. But somebody will find a way to slowly run Doom at some point.

      We have to stop these nerdy freaks from hacking up every tech into a mess just to result in new standards and languages that reboot the whole cycle over again so we can waste our lives learning the picky

      • by narcc ( 412956 )

        That was HTML and CSS together that was shown to be Turing complete by implementing rule 110. IIRC, you needed check boxes from HTML to make it work.

        We have to stop these nerdy freaks from hacking up every tech into a mess just to result in new standards and languages that reboot the whole cycle over again so we can waste our lives learning the picky details of the latest rehash while the kiddies ignorantly mock our wisdom.

        Relax. It's just a silly game. It's not that dissimilar to those crazy things some people have done with Conway's Game of Life.

  • Some of us are old enough to remember the blink tag and other CSS crimes.

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