Image to HTML converter

Sunday, June 24th, 2007
by William

This is probably how the Japanese guy drew with HTML.

http://neil.fraser.name/software/img2html/

How does it work?
A table is created which is filled with large numbers of 1×1 cells. Each cell has a background colour of the corresponding pixel in the image. That’s all it is; just a massive grid of coloured table cells. View the source to see the details.

I failed to put it on my blog because…

Why does it take so long to display?
Web browsers are designed to display image files; they aren’t optimised for 10,000 cell tables. To help the browser out, the table is chopped up into smaller tables, each containing about 15 horizontal lines. This allows browsers like MSIE to render the chunks independently without having to wait for the entire image to load. Other browsers such as Mozilla don’t care, since they are capable of rendering tables as they load.