256b JavaScript demos

SkyLined — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:34 +0000

Everybody that has a fascination with computers and programming will have seen “demos”; programs intended to show off some cool graphics that are supposed to be the cutting edge of what’s possible in that specific language. I personally particularly like size-restricted demos, which do some really cool stuff in the least number of bytes possible. Most of such demos choose a power of 2 for the size limit, particularly as 256 bytes, 1Kb, 4Kb, or 64Kb.

I’ve been working on a browser demo, written in JavaScript and HTML, for quite a bit now. I’m hoping that at some point I can combine all the “scenes” I created into one coherent demo. Until then, here are two small 255 byte demos to have a look at:

I got the idea for these from two other 256b JavaScript demos by bonz and shr respectively.

These have been tested with various browsers and seem to work on all but FireFox 2.

Update: using array indices instead of “.chatAt()” saves a few more bytes, which allows me to use innerHTML instead of innerText. This means the code renders correctly in Firefox. However, this feature is no available in MSIE unles you specify the right DTD, which would push the size over 256 bytes. Therefore, the below two work on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari but not MSIE:

Skypher » JavaScript demo Mandelbrot Julia 256b

256b JavaScript demos