I just found this website (zine?) through Kottke.org:
https://thehtml.review/04/
[_The html review table of contents for issue 4.png]
A brief description of the page: the page loads a hallway created throughASCII characters. You can see various doorways continuing forward in a single point perspective - think Kubrick films where there is a single, central vanishing point for the scene. As you scroll, the doorways come into view. Each has a title, an author name, and link with description into the target page.
Each page is different depending on the idea for the art.
This website is art. It takes simple HTML and does wild things with CSS to affect how that HTML is presented to the reader. The only JavaScript is the scroll effect for this edition of the page. On mobile, that scroll effect doesn’t do anything which is good because the experience would be weird in a bad way.
This is a big deal and probably the best example I’ve seen for accessible online art that does a pretty good job translating the experience to all types of users. Take a look at some of the code…
[_The HTML Review code example.png]
On the left an image with X letters covering it to form a mesh. At the right, the very readable html of that exact thing. It’s literally an image with the characters in a paragraph after it. The image has a description explain how the two interact and all the letters are just letters so there’s a direct translation.
There’s a link to the page above the art and the author name after. That’s it.
It’s brilliant.
Don’t they though? It’s a text description on the image, sure, but the directly readable Xs after that still presents the density and obscuring nature of the ascii mesh. Is it the exact same experience a sighted user gets? No.
FUCK* no. If you have always experienced the web in a more sequential manner, that experience is perceptible albeit through a non-sighted experience.
Why are you asking silly questions? Art exists in the link from the artists intent, the resultant piece, and the observer’s life experience brought to it. Art is never a singular, insulated and definitional consistent thing.
This page shows the importance of good, core HTML usage in accessible technology. The CSS can affect some of that experience but the central ideas are presented in a way anyone can access. The overall experience will never be absolutely consistent but you’d be dumb to think that is ever the case in anything created and consumed by actual people.
The only thing preventing accessible experiences are choices made by people. Do what this page does - do better.
Published on March 22, 2025 – art