I'm totally down for some good old fashioned impractical hacking. But just remem...

egypturnash · 2024-07-21T18:05:30 1721585130

But with less comedic value. Doing this with nothing but box-shadow is funny, mostly because it is so impractical.

klysm · 2024-07-21T18:13:53 1721585633

Canvas throws away a lot though, especially w accessibility

tkzed49 · 2024-07-21T21:42:00 1721598120

now I'm imagining a screen reader reading off the coordinates of 1000 box shadows

recursive · 2024-07-22T00:42:05 1721608925

You could probably get it to png encode a canvas and then read it in hex too.

recursive · 2024-07-21T19:01:23 1721588483

Really? I would have guessed that canvas provides pretty much exactly the same accessibility as a UI rendered entirely out of box shadows.

dmazzoni · 2024-07-22T00:33:39 1721608419

Canvas is better...if you're trying to do something that stays within a fixed-size box.

kroltan · 2024-07-22T15:31:15 1721662275

Canvas would still be faster even if you used a full-screen box. Just the string concatenation overhead of doing this with box-shadows is insanely wasteful.

Which isn't to demerit the hackish creativity of taking one thing and running with it! But if you wanted to do a ball painting effect like that outside this "what if" context, it would be technically irresponsible to do it with box-shadows.

hnbad · 2024-07-22T10:12:04 1721643124

Sure, and we already have keyboards, so there's no need to use floppy drives or rubber chickens to make music either.