HTML is a native image format, hear me out • Hacker News Board

Re: HTML is a native image format, hear me out

#61

Post by yeargun » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

CMay wrote: post #59

We already have iframe and the srcdoc attribute which you can set directly to the document contents without pointing to an external url. So there's nothing new about that. This is primarily about serializing page content more efficiently than the naive approaches. Advertisements are also generally content in iframes. The only difference here really is that you want the content to be blobs and embedded in the page rat…

Yeah yeah, tbh even though I branded it like that in the website, packing strategy & overall, its pretty much an apparent technology/library. I realy wanted some such technology 2 years ago, while genai text layouts were lame ash, and I questioned why noone does something like this (diffusion does not play well, or we havent figure it out yet, who knows? https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-... )

And overall one of the exciting part for me is, to be able to have composable & editable images, hopefuly generated by future genAI models.

And finally, I just realy wanted to rant over what a 'digital image' is

Re: HTML is a native image format, hear me out

#62

Post by yeargun » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #55

voidUpdate wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much what I was thinking too. "A way to create an image, with parts that can be edited using tags, that an LLM can deal with... this sounds like SVG"

In case you missed it—I’m not showing regular SVG, I’m showing using HTML as an image, via an SVG container. This has worked fine in browsers for more than ten years (around twenty, other than IE/Edge).

yeah I saw it, thats a crazy trick

Re: HTML is a native image format, hear me out

#63

Post by Semaphor » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

yeargun wrote: post #56

Semaphor wrote: post #49

Opened. Had some typing animation make the page jump around because the text would switch between one and two lines. Closed the slop. The frequency of these things certainly rose with AI.

Slop :D can you revisit please? What browser are you using ? The library is not curing cancer And also it's the first time im hearing that its not working. My goal was to discuss the meaning of what a 'digital image' is.. You can also take a look at this https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/s/7KLKg3wS0D

Firefox, latest stable.

https://imgur.com/a/KjrSTjk

Re: HTML is a native image format, hear me out

#64

Post by CMay » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

yeargun wrote: post #61

CMay wrote: post #59

We already have iframe and the srcdoc attribute which you can set directly to the document contents without pointing to an external url. So there's nothing new about that. This is primarily about serializing page content more efficiently than the naive approaches. Advertisements are also generally content in iframes. The only difference here really is that you want the content to be blobs and embedded in the page rat…

Yeah yeah, tbh even though I branded it like that in the website, packing strategy & overall, its pretty much an apparent technology/library. I realy wanted some such technology 2 years ago, while genai text layouts were lame ash, and I questioned why noone does something like this (diffusion does not play well, or we havent figure it out yet, who knows? https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...…

That's one of the blessings and the curses of the flexibility of web technologies. They're easy to abuse, or repurpose and see the everyday normal things from new perspectives. That can be good, or it can be bad. There are often many ways to achieve the same thing.

Decades ago there were cool ideas that I loved that simply never took off. They faded away into obscurity. The technology isn't always that important to keep, but the love is. Keep feeling excited about things even if people don't buy into them, because nurturing that feeling of excitement for possibilities is usually more important than today's thing. It's something that can pull you forward to keep trying things. You'll cover a lot of ground that other people already did decades ago, but eventually you'll hit things nobody else did and that becomes important.