Sunday, November 3, 2024

Sneaky CSS and JavaScript Tricks Using HTML 5

There are some sneaky tricks that can be accomplished using CSS, HTML 5’s canvas tag, JavaScript and PNG images. An example would be the hack developed by Jacob Seidelin at Nihilogic.dk, who used PNG images to compress the HTML and JavaScript on a web page by up to 75%.


Seidelin created the hack, which has been used by other participants at the 10K An Event Apart competition, although some may debate the merits of using such a hack in the event.
The idea is to compress the CSS and JavaScript code using a compression tool, encode it as a PNG graphic, extract the code from the image, such as when the image is loaded into a canvas element using the drawImage() method, and converting the data to a string.


By using Seidelin’s method, you could save 75% of the file size, and in some cases, even beat the compression savings of those files compressed using Gzip. That said, it’s usually easier and better to use the Gzip format.

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