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I built this website to see what was possible with only one div, and a stylesheet.

No JS, No other HTML, just CSS.

Source: https://github.com/archiewood/pure-css-site

After examples showcased at https://a.singlediv.com/, I would not be surprised by anything...
That's not fair, they clearly have illustration skills ;)
I see multiple <divs> in the source of that site. That's not a single div.
Each image on that page is created with just a single div.
Maybe each image; but still not a single div.
Aaah that one was great, thank you for reminding!
This is a 404, btw. Private repo?
oops well i just saw this took off and have made it public - thanks
> one div

<html> and <body> accept pseudo-elements. Why add such bloat?!

That link currently 404s, and doesn't seem to be listed when manually navigating up to the user repository list.
I am both horrified and impressed.
Nice! I love seeing stuff like this on HN.

Using a solid border for the cursor instead of having it in the text content is a nice touch; because it's separated out you could probably use another animation to get it blinking, too.

i was kind of messing around with this blinking idea but couldn't get it to render in a way I was happy with

would you use another keyframe or did you have something else in mind

Yep, that was my thought, but there might be complications I haven't thought of. This is me guessing without having tried anything.

> couldn't get it to render in a way I was happy with

I might be repeating something you already noticed, but cursors only blink after you stop typing, so if you weren't delaying the effect until after the typing was done that might have contributed.

I’m getting 404. Is it because I’m not logged in?
Cool, is the div necessary? Could you style the <link>?
Never knew "content" was animatable. This might come in handy some time.
well it's not hard to believe given that it doesn't seem to have anything but that one paragraph of text and then the animated sentence at the top

am I not seeing something else?

(comment deleted)
I had a similar thought. I thought "wow, believable!" but not to be flippant, the initial wow was genuine.
Yeah, that was exactly my thought too, but then I've been doing web dev for 20 years so obviously it wouldn't come as much of a surprise to me that this is possible.

I guess not all people are in the same boat though, and I suppose it is quite cool how much can be done with CSS these days! (not that you would necessarily want to).

You could embed JS into CSS in 1999 in IE5 so CSS has always been a lot of "you can do a lot of weird things."
The ease of dropping in a "useState" and high-ish performance js engines has made high-level CSS wizardry a bit of a lost art.
And none of the text is selectable :(
Ah so it's more like a pure css mobile app.
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You shouldn't actually build your entire website in CSS -- it's going to be inaccessible no matter what because CSS isn't really for content.

But it's cool to see what's possible, mostly because learning how to overcome these challenges to use a tool in a way it shouldn't be used often requires you to learn more about how the tool works. That the tool is ill-suited is the point.

Of course, not that there isn't value in you pointing out that CSS content isn't accessible :) -- I have seen developers get tripped up by that in production settings particularly when building things like hover labels, so a reminder is always appreciated.

Noticed the same. Would be interested to know what the page is like for people who use screen readers. Does the whole page seem blank for them?
What's the purpose of remote background image? Tracking?
Pure CSS. Invalid HTML.

Nice job tho. Now just need to make it in 3D.

I wasn't going to mention the invalid HTML. Thank you for doing it.
I thought we all agreed to ignore validity a while back when XHTML gave way to HTML5.
How is XHTML any more valid than HTML 5?
XHTML had to be valid XML, that was the entire shtick.

Comparatively HTML5 is very lenient in its spec. Browsers are even more lenient in their implementation.

It has a pretty well defined spec. It's just not XML, and I think that's okay.

Do you have any examples of undefined or linient rules?

I'm a big fan of optional closing tags that HTML5 has. Can do stuff like:

  <h2> Todo List
  <ul>
   <li> Do task A
   <li> Do task B
  <p> Dear Diary, ...
Almost as easy as markdown. Couldn't get this working with XML.
Indeed, the fact that HTML5 specified the exact way to turn any stream of bytes into a DOM means that "error" cases are really just academic/theoretical.
If you have browser extensions that make additional div, it looks weird: i.imgur.com/glCfzkj.png
That is pretty cool.

I wonder if you could do this with no <div> using just the <link> tag.

Or do browsers add an implicit body tag if you don't put one that you can style?

A self-closing div is not valid HTML.
Nice work! It’s possible to get rid of even that single div - https://35bytes.maczan.pl/
awesome. the single div was a performance bottleneck for me.
Did you see this in the css

    @keyframes typewriter {
    00.0% { content: "A" }
    00.4% { content: "A " }
    00.8% { content: "A W" }
    01.2% { content: "A We" }
    01.6% { content: "A Web" }
    02.0% { content: "A Webs" }
    02.4% { content: "A Websi" }
    02.8% { content: "A Websit" }
    03.2% { content: "A Website" }
    13.2% { content: "A Website," }
    13.6% { content: "A Website, " }
    14.0% { content: "A Website, i" }
    14.4% { content: "A Website, in" }
    14.8% { content: "A Website, in " }
    15.2% { content: "A Website, in P" }
    15.6% { content: "A Website, in Pu" }
    16.0% { content: "A Website, in Pur" }
    16.4% { content: "A Website, in Pure" }
    16.8% { content: "A Website, in Pure " }
    17.2% { content: "A Website, in Pure C" }
    17.6% { content: "A Website, in Pure CS" }
    18.0% { content: "A Website, in Pure CSS" }
    22.2% { content: "A Website, in Pure CSS." }
}
Yes, I opened the CSS file and there it was.
just hardcoded things :)
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Before it starts to look a bit ugly

div::after { font-family: var(--secondary-font); font-size: 1em; user-select: all; content: " \A \ This website contains one <div> only. \A \ No JavaScript. \A \ The rest is pure CSS. \A \ \A \ The <div> is animated with CSS keyframes, \A \ styled with CSS variables, \A \ styled with CSS transitions, \A \ styled with CSS pseudo-elements, \A \ styled with CSS pseudo-classes. \A \ But that's it. \A \ "; }

That's impressive. I expected, "Sure, it works, but the CSS is going to be a nightmare." Instead, the CSS is pretty, straightforward and easy to understand.

I love it!

Thanks - I do honestly think the keyframes are a bit of a nightmare, but they also kind of make the site
Alternate title: "How to scare an engineer in three words"
Previous work in this field:

https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/css-without-html - completely empty html, doesn't seem to work on Mac Safari any more, does work on Firefox for me. See https://css-tricks.com/using-css-without-html/ if you want to know how it works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160420232319/cj-johnson.github... (original copy defunct) - kinda broken now, the source is just a single <link> (if you ignore all the stuff the Wayback Machine adds)

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You can add a bg to the body and and style to the HTML
CSS is Turing complete, so if you want to make anything you could
Yep. It'd be a fun project to write a compiler for another language that emitted executable CSS on the back end.
Many browser like Firefox support the HTTP header (not HTML header) field for defining external style sheets. You could make a 0 byte HTML page by using this feature in the HTTP response header.

    Link: <//website.css>; REL=stylesheet
I knew it would be a demonstration of the CSS "generated content" feature.
For reasons that are probably out of scope for CSS, I would really like to be able to do more with the CSS content property.

It's one broad class of problem really: many frameworks make changing the HTML they generate difficult or impossible. Inevitably you end up needing to inject a button or a hyperlinked image or something in a particular position, and you have to resort to Javascript to do something that isn't interactive and isn't a program, which feels like the wrong tool.

You could argue that both Javascript and CSS are the wrong tool for this use case, but CSS would be the more convenient wrong tool.

First single-page applications. Now single <div> applications.

What next? Single letter applications?

Single Pixel Applications.

Conveniently abbreviates to SPA.