I made a star chart, which is kind of like a clock in the form of a map of the sky, in pure HTML/CSS, that starts at the correct current time without resorting to JS:

http://lee-phillips.org/skymap/

You might consider my solution cheating, however.

EDIT: The trick I used is basically what jwarren describes below.

Interesting article and a great app. But yeah, that's "cheating". :)

For extreme impracticality, you could have server-side generated CSS which outputs the right CSS values depending on what time it's requested. Then no JS is required.

If by 'handles' you mean hands, what I built does that with CSS3's animation and transformations. No JS necessary. It's setting the initial positions that's the problem - CSS has no clock functionality.

The only non-JS solution is to tell people to only load the page at exactly 12:00:00, but that's a bit impractical.

> The only non-JS solution is to tell people to only load the page at exactly 12:00:00

If it's just a problem of initialization, couldn't you include a continuously-updated current_time.css file served with cache-control: no-cache?

You could estimate timezone from IP. It's not perfect, but it's the best you're gonna get without getTimezoneOffset().

apparently a firefox issue, it doesn't animate in FF but does in Chrome.

That's actually a lazy-developer-only-bothered-with-the-webkit-animation-class issue rather than a Firefox issue. Adding keyframes, moz-keyframes, and o-keyframes would make it cross-browser.