Checkboxland | Hacker News Reader

Checkboxland

bryanbraun.com

284 pointsthunderbong39 comments

I thought this was going to be an elaborate rant about how modern corporate life has become about checking boxes instead of doing actual work.

This is good too.

I was expecting a rant about cookie consent pop-ups.

I was thinking it was going to be about manual software testing.

Instead I spent a few minutes trying to navigate my bedroom by checkbox camera. It didn't go well, but kudos to the author just the same.

Genius. How can any programmer be bored on a Sunday when there are things like this. What a time to be alive.

Was thinking it would be a memo about how soul crushing adding regulatory compliance to UIs is.

"Don't you see, no one has ever done this before! I've got to do this! I've got to do this!"

With that last shout and a wild look in his eye he ran madly out of the lab, hurrying back to his office.

pretty accurate tbh

Somewhere another madman plots an ncurses version for viewing in lynx.

There's a better webcam demo that's kind of buried but fun to play with here: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/webcam-te...

“Render anything as HTML checkboxes” is the best headline!

This definitely seems like more of a "for fun" project, but it's a fun challenge to think about a practical situation where this is the best solution.

It's fun, sure but no doubt canvas is the way to go for the same effect at less memory overhead.

Indeed. Back in about 2010 or so when I made a Minecraft Redstone Simulator[1], I initially prototyped using a <table> for the display of the "grid".

Just making the cells change colour as a mouse was clicked and dragged over the cells (to draw) was very laggy. After which I switched to canvas which worked really well.

At the time I was a very inexperienced developer but looking back now it was very obvious a table with cell approach wouldn't be performant.

[1]: https://mordritch.com/mc_rss/

> think about a practical situation where this is the best solution.

could be used as a captcha style roadblock!

God help us all.

To continue please check all checkboxes to display the mona lisa

Not sure if lynx supports check boxes, but might be a way to include native animated graphics where ascii art is merely static

Does Lynx support javascript?

No, Lynx doesn't support JavaScript. I think to get something close you'd have to do a page refresh (e.g. <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1">) and set the check box states-server side to emulate 'animation' in this way.

The rationale is fantastic:

https://www.bryanbraun.com/2020/06/06/checkboxland/

Must be one of my favorite projects in a long while. Such a mad/brilliant idea, and the aestethic is remarkable for such an odd thing as a checkbox.

Many thanks to the poster.

When I saw the link title on HN I immediately thought of the idea of implementing Conway's game of life using a grid of checkboxes. It is actually there. Neat!

Pixelation alone would be nothing new but these are stateful interactive pixels! Hilariously crazy.

This is cool, but I wish the Game of Life let you change the pattern by manually toggling check boxes with your mouse. Right now, if you pause the game and change which boxes are checked, they'll revert to the previous state once the game is resumed.

Where is Minesweeper example? :-D

That would be hard to do. Checkboxes can only be in two distinct states.

Three, if you count disabled.

And partial, no? So four states.

Right. But that still isn't enough for minesweeper, where a cell can be: covered, marked, uncovered with no mines next to it, uncovered with one mine next to it, uncovered with two mines next to it… etc until uncovered with eight mines next to it.

So except if you limit the game to having no cells with more then one neighbors with a mine, it won't work.

What I'd do:

• All squares start off as unchecked boxes.

• Marked squares are partially-checked boxes.

• Revealed bombs (e.g. player lost, show the board) are fully checked.

• Uncovered squares are deleted, and a number is placed in the space as simple text.

You could absolutely argue the last point is cheating, but, meh, I feel it's within the spirit of the idea.

(Undecided on whether to use disabled checkboxes to mark the perimeter of the playing field; I'd have to try it and see what felt right.)

We can go higher:

    <input type="checkbox" />
    <input type="checkbox" checked />
    <input type="checkbox" indeterminate />
    <input type="checkbox" disabled />
    <input type="checkbox" disabled checked />
    <input type="checkbox" disabled indeterminate />

See the snake game on the website.

What I appreciate is keyboard navigation on demos, from any demo to Marquee even gradually transition from previous to next one without refreshing the whole scene.

Looking at the code, it seems weird that each <input type=checkbox> has style="..." in it. Why not use a class or .input[type=checkbox] {...}

Is this available as a three.js renderer?

This would be good for a chip8 display

I needed a good giggle and there it is! Thanks! I enjoyed that!

Reminds me of a colleague many years ago who made pictures as a table with each cell assigned a background colour, manually editing the html!

Any chance your colleague has a YouTube channel and is named "Matt Parker" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I ?

Yes, but is it WCAG 2.1 AA compliant?

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