If you cut down a 50 foot tall tree with a swiss army knife, I'd like to see how you did it. I think it's clear the author isn't stupid and did this to see what was possible with a limited tool.

My point was that, with enough perseverance, one can do practically anything with anything (or nothing). Just because something is possible doesn't make doing it an intelligent thing if it's just a brute force effort. While herculean efforts of perseverance are commendable displays of stamina (like (http://links.zigzo.com/files/2007/10/coat_20hanger_20gorilla...) this gorilla made out of coat hangers), once the basic theory has been demonstrated, the intellectual interest is over. See also, X program implementation in Y Turing-complete language (I'm specifically reminded of a chess engine written in the infamous Brainf*, which was really just a C chess engine converted to BF).

Perseverance and stamina are rare qualities, and that gorilla is a very nice work of art. A ported BF chess engine not so much. Now, a C-to-BF compiler would be interesting.

The recent "X in pure CSS" theme is important as it shows how advanced CSS3 is. They are tech demos, which as we know are often not meant to be anything more than that. They display how far you can bend CSS and nothing more. Just like the Blendtech ads, if someone cut down a tree with a pocket knife in an afternoon I bet 1/2 of us would run out to buy that knife.

If an artist had done this using more standard tools and rendered it as SVG no one would care. I think you've completely missed the point.

edit: It seems that psadauskas made this point some time ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1428943

I'm sorry but this is a tiny fraction of CSS3. Lets see some real cool stuffs.

However, "look what I can do in CSS3" is always fun to see, because it introduces techniques not necessarily just the technology.

The very definition of hacking is using something in a way it was not meant to be used. Last time I checked, the top left of this site still said 'Hacker News'. If you find hacks stupid, why are you here?

You act like its a pointless pursuit to try something experimental for fun just because you're bored. That is your point, no?

The only html5 think here is border-radius. Now this just shows that we can encode weird shapes using borders which is a well known fairly old technique.

Perhaps we can have a small image maker took which generates html5 vs an image.

Now that is great and all and is probably a really nice experiment into doing stuff with CSS, but this is a tiny fraction of what CSS can do being used, but practically, an image takes less memory/cpu to render.

I'm not trying to be a dick, but I think you mean CSS3. HTML5 and CSS3 aren't the same thing.