Homer Simpson Drawn With Web 2.0-Style ASCII Art

boogi78 writes "Remember ASCII art? This is the Web 2.0 CSS version of ASCII art featuring Homer Simpson. Here is a CSS G.W. Bush. There's also an program that automatically converts jpegs into 'CSS images,' but it's a Windows executable. I found no sources for it, but I got it to work with WINE."

art?

[the brown guy (1235418)]

"Remember ASCII art?"

If you're asking, you must be new here.

Original Thread

[by Anonymous Coward]

Original pouet thread which this spawned:
http://pouet.net/topic.php?which=5204&page=1 [pouet.net]

Seen this long ago for Mac OS X

[aarku (151823)]

Sameish idea: DeImg [thedailygrind.net] from The Daily Grind Network.

Re:Seen this long ago for Mac OS X

[by Anonymous Coward]

Sameish idea: DeImg [thedailygrind.net] from The Daily Grind Network.

AKA how to turn a 30k image into a 6 meg browser killing table.

Seen it longer ago

[mrmeval (662166)]

pngtopnm | ppmtopgm | pgmnorm | pnmscale -width 80 | ppmtopgm | pgmtopbm | pbmtoascii

Re:Seen this long ago for Mac OS X

[Eli Gottlieb (917758)]

But of course! That's what Web 2.0 is all about: turning simple applications with a bit of necessary networking into unmanageably complex monstrosities requiring a full data-center and a plugged-up, memory-gobbling web browser to support one measly user and brought to life by the power of Great Cthulhu.

Re:

[Xzzy (111297)]

In its defense, I've seen stuff like this used to get around firewall or web filtering limitations. ;)

Gestapo blocking jpegs? Get someone to convert it to an ascii format and render it in the browser.

Re:Seen this long ago for Mac OS X

[jasonjacks0n (762945)]

Sameish idea: DeImg [thedailygrind.net] from The Daily Grind Network.

Actually, this is a bit different - and much more unique and impressive, IMHO. I can't get to the first link (slashdotted already), but the Bush portrait and this Homer [romancortes.com] are both made using overlapping bits of various font characters, sized and colored using CSS, to make the curves and lines of the picture.

View source on that Homer "image" to see what I mean - the artist basically used font characters as a palette of vectors, and clipped out just the partial shape of each character that he wanted, using CSS properties.

As a result, instead of bloating to many MB, that Homer picture is only ~16KB. Bush is only ~32KB.

Translating pixels into an HTML table is not that interesting now.. I mean, I was excited when my brother wrote an app to do that about 8 years ago, and I even wrote a little companion app that parsed ANSI escape sequences and turned ANSI art into HTML tables too, but that was back then. :)

This, on the other hand, is really original and unique. I'm pretty impressed by it.

Scales up really well

[Mathinker (909784)]

The big advantage of this kind of graphic is that it scales up to a nice sharp anti-aliased image as the user increases the text size. Well, at least Homer did when I tried it.

But of course, properly implemented SVG would do that just as well. It just lacks the super-geekiness of using something in an unintended way to get a useful result. And, of course, this way might have better support in some browsers than SVG.

Re:

[ramk13 (570633)]

I think my browser (Firefox) cried while it was trying to render that table. And my computer isn't that slow (C2Q Q6600 @ 3.0 GhZ). That was ridiculous.

Nothing like having my portrait done in CSS

[HomerJ (11142)]

That's the most beautiful thing these eyes have ever seen....well except for Marge, when she wears that blue thing with the things.

Web 2.0?

[Chris Burkhardt (613953)]

So now using CSS and JavaScript is a criterion for "Web 2.0"? When will it end?

Re:Web 2.0?

[brucifer (12972)]

So now using CSS and JavaScript is a criterion for "Web 2.0"? When will it end?

When "Web 3.0" hits

Re:

[Chris Burkhardt (613953)]

When "Web 3.0" hits

Ah. Can't wait.

Re:Web 2.0?

[Mathinker (909784)]

If we're really lucky, after that we'll get Web 3.1, Web 3.14, Web 3.141, ...
But don't hold your breath waiting...

Re:Web 2.0?

[osu-neko (2604)]

Are you sure that's the progression? I thought Web 3.1 would be followed by Web 3.11, and then by Web for Workgroups.

Re:

[harry666t (1062422)]

TeX has been written in Web, hasn't it? (:

Re:Web 2.0?

[pbhj (607776)]

Web 3.0 will be coming out with something truly fantastic... perhaps they'll introduce something called HTML?

I know that was a tongue-in-cheek rhetorical question but ... I'm hoping "web 3.0" will have wide use of SVG. When I can design webpages like I design the previews in a vector editor ... no hang on, that might put me out of a job - please stick to the current mess.

Carry on.

Re:

[omeomi (675045)]

"Web 2.0" is clearly just a meaningless buzz-word, but "AJAX" has a relatively distinct and understandable meaning. The use of the XMLHttpRequest to alter portions of a page without reloading the whole page seems like it should have _some_ name, especially since we all remember a time when it was basically impossible to do. AJAX is as good a name as any other.

Re:Web 2.0?

[BBrown (70466)]

Agree. Using CSS is NOT a Web 2.0 application. I would expect better from /.ers.

Recommend those curious read O'Reilly's definition here:
  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [oreillynet.com].
 
Since he coined it, he's probably pretty accurate. A lot of it generally includes user-generated content and the transition from single publisher sites (NYTimes) to community driven sites (blogs, Yelp!, etc.)

Here's a table he uses to explain the difference:
 

Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0
DoubleClick -> Google AdSense
Ofoto -> Flickr
Akamai -> BitTorrent
mp3.com -> Napster
Britannica Online -> Wikipedia
personal websites -> blogging
evite -> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation -> search engine optimization
page views -> cost per click
screen scraping -> web services
publishing -> participation
content management systems -> wikis
directories (taxonomy) -> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness -> syndication

Re:

[ultranova (717540)]

Agree. Using CSS is NOT a Web 2.0 application. I would expect better from /.ers.

However, if you add some XML in there somewhere, it should qualify.

Since he coined it, he's probably pretty accurate.

I find it unlikely that anyone counting BitTorrent as a Web application is particularly accurate. Unless, of course, he meant the BitTorrent sites, but how are those principally different from a forum where you could post links to ?

Re:

[NotBorg (829820)]

Recommend those curious read O'Reilly's definition

That definition is 5 pages long. No wonder no one knows what it is. Or perhaps "definition" is not really the word you're looking. "Description" would perhaps be a better word.

From the O'Reilly article:

"Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core."

Sounds kinda fuzzy to me. At any rate it's kind of like the words "gay" and "hacker." They don't mean what they used to mean and you can't really do mu

Re:

[Dan541 (1032000)]

I'm sick of the whole "Web 2.0" buzz word that those media asshats keep spreading all over the place.

It almost as bad as "Information super highway"

Re:

[Provocateur (133110)]

What was .0 the mid 90s web of sliced to hell images, frames, and animated gif based technologies.

mid-90s? I swear I saw all that in MySpace just the other day

Only one thing to say about this rubbish...

[Cryacin (657549)]

DOH!!!

Bored?

[frdmfghtr (603968)]

Clearly this is the result of having FAR too much free time.

Re:Bored?

[Ardeaem (625311)]

Clearly this is the result of having FAR too much free time.

...says the guy reading and posting on Slashdot :)

Re:Bored?

[MooseMuffin (799896)]

Speaking as someone with far too much free time, I've never done anything /. worthy. I imagine the same is true of many of us, so lets give the guy some credit.

Re:

[Skapare (16644)]

Maybe they should start employing computer people to keep them out of trouble.

Re:

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

Clearly this is the result of having FAR too much free time.

Maybe. But it's far more respectable than the hordes of people trying to rehash a Balmer-throwing-chair joke, then the rush for people with mod points to mod it up.

Looks like Prodigy art

[jmauro (32523)]

Looks just like the block art from Prodigy [wikipedia.org] from back in 1990's. All this tech and we're back to the same place as 1995.

Re:

[Enderandrew (866215)]

I loved Prodigy. I do remember the Mad Maze specifically.

Slashdotted

[Itninja (937614)]

And only after 25 comments. :O(

Nothing to see...

[creimer (824291)]

The site you are attempting to access is temporarily unavailable.
If you are the site owner please contact your system administrator.

Yeah, those are ASCII characters.

Great, now I'm gonna have nightmares.

[Perseid (660451)]

If you think the blocky ASCII Dubya is bad, highlight his text. Holy crap.

I really expected teh bush one to be

[infonography (566403)]

goatse

and I would have felt it was a good likeness.

Remember the printer art?

[thewils (463314)]

Those line printers could be coaxed to kick out some interesting pictures. I found some on a cassette tape once while clearing out a cupboard, suitable for a Datapoint machine. I seem to remember I taught myself enough Datapoint assembler to be able to print them out.

I must have been desperate back then...

Working Link

[TwilightSentry (956837)]

As the Homer link doesn't seem to work for me, try: http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/ [romancortes.com]

Nothing to see here, move along

[hee gozer (1261036)]

It needs Verdana from MS TrueType core fonts, so it doesn't work across multiple platforms. The link is slashdotted anyway. Here's a version that's still available: http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/ [romancortes.com]

Here's how i see it: http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/9183/homeraz4.png [imageshack.us]

Re:

[Nicolay77 (258497)]

This is the first time I have ever seen the Homer rendered that bad.

What ugly browser do you use?

Homer

[commodoresloat (172735)]

See, you're using Web 1.0, so it's rendering Homer more like he was drawn in the early Simpsons cartoons.

Front page perfection

[peipas (809350)]

Ahhh, posts about the Simpsons AND MacGyver on the front page at the same time. I can die now; order has been restored.

zooming - change text size in browser

[ayeco (301053)]

Interesting. In Firefox crtl+mouse wheel or ctrl++ to zoom text, as well as css image. Page zoom is different in IE7 (it has always zoomed an entire page, text and images).

But can I block it?

[DJ Manning (824830)]

I fear that our advertising overlords will use this to display advertising that I'd otherwise block. The next step in fighting advertising on the web? Block all ASCII charaters from being displayed!!! That'll fix those advertisers.

SVG is dead!

[chrysalis (50680)]

If SVN was working in common browsers, that news would be boring.

Slashdot owes me the cost of two ibuprofen.

[urcreepyneighbor (1171755)]

My head hurts whenever I read "Web 2.0".

Do the world a favor: smack anyone who uses the phrase "web two point oh" in a conversation. Smack them. Smack them hard.

This tool is _so cool_

[multipart/mixed (163409)]

I've been sending goatse pics to unsuspecting web-savvy friends all morning. I haven't pulled off an unsuspecting-goatse in _years_!

I attach them as HTML source inside text/plain MIME sections

Nerdy friends then get annoyed at my email-incompetence, save them as .html files and pop 'em open in the browser.

Whooo hoooo

Now... who else can I goatse?

Re:

[squidinkcalligraphy (558677)]

I mean really, you'd think a little bit of css wouldn't create _that_ much bandwidth...

Re:heh, slashdotted already...

[Nullav (1053766)]

Google cache. [209.85.207.104] It doesn't animate, but the text-image is somewhat impressive.

Re:

[Tacvek (948259)]

It looks fine on Windows with Firefox and Opera at the very least. However, it requires a specific font (Verdana) which may cause problems with some Linux systems that do not have that font installed.