This is Not an Image

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It's no joke; there's no image on this screen. Or rather, no image file is being accessed. The screen is drawing the image entirely through Cascading Style Sheets. 1028 <p> tags are each given an id consisting of a location and a background colour value; manipulating these values through JavaScript, the "image" can be lightened, darkened, inverted, and reset, all without loading new graphics.

An image is, after all, just made up of a series of pixels, and each pixel is really just a coloured square, so style sheets can easily block out a series of squares, like so:

Is there a valid reason to do this? Not really, and in fact this method, for this particular image, is wildly inefficient—the style sheet used is about 30kb, and the colour information is another 12kb, and the <p> tags are another 20, for a grand total of about 62kb (although these could be reduced via JavaScript substantially), for what would likely be 6 or 7 kb as a JPG. The point here is not to be efficient, though, the point is to prove just how powerful style sheets can be in creating a visual structure, and how flexible they can be with a little JavaScript added.