There's a fella who built a helicopter for himself out of a whole bunch of small electric motors and a battery pack that looks bit like a pilates ball.
...because he can.
These types of demos exist to show what can be done with a bit of experimentation. It may not be salable, scalable or sane. But it's interesting nonetheless.
The purpose of this is to not be useful. The purpose of this is to exist.
That is a good answer, I made it 'cause I can! haha
No, now seriously... It was something I made, like he said, for advertising. I though that maybe was a good idea show something unusual to my clients trying to catch their attention and that's it. And today i woke up and i saw all these people talking about it. Unbelievable.
Thanks you guys for your opinion. I appreciate it.
You know, this happens a lot here -- this exact same thing. Someone makes an elaborate piece of art with CSS, you get some response saying hey CSS wasn't meant for this and to complete the cycle finally you'd have a comment saying "but he's just being a hacker, this is how we get innovation!".
It's great we celebrate hacker culture, -- as we well should, but isn't art via CSS getting a bit hackneyed by now? And are there really people still out there who're unaware that they can do this kind of snazzy stuff with CSS?
Certainly though if for example someone mockingly questioned something like Fabrice Bellard's PC emulator in Javascript for its lack of practical good we would rightfully come down on them. I certainly don't mean to criticize the author here -- he is very obviously an expert at CSS, but I'm not sure if we can put 'fella who built a helicopter' in the same category as CSS art.
It's not in the same category as CSS art in the sense they're equivalent accomplishments. I imagine a helicopter failure has a potentially lethal outcome vs. carpal tunnel for repeated CSS hacking.
They are in the same category as... "because I can". Which doesn't seem like something worthy of celebration, but creative expression in unexpected forms should be admired regardless of medium.
> Are there really people still out there who're unaware that they can do this kind of snazzy stuff with CSS?
...because he can.
These types of demos exist to show what can be done with a bit of experimentation. It may not be salable, scalable or sane. But it's interesting nonetheless.
The purpose of this is to not be useful. The purpose of this is to exist.