HTML Kong (opens in new tab)

Author here. It was done with a Python script that parses the CSS into a stream of characters annotated with metadata saying whether the character is allowed to be escaped and whether whitespace can be inserted before or after it. It's then just a matter of breaking up the stream where whitespace is permitted and using the escaping to pad segments to the exact size required.

Definitely not recommended in production. Other than the obvious inefficiency, it was only supported in Chrome fairly recently (even though the CSS escaping rules have remained largely unchanged for 20 years or so). In this case, though, the game itself depended on recent bug fixes in Chrome, so there wasn't much point in worrying about compatibility with older versions.

Remove all the whitespace, and then add spaces and newlines in legal positions to make the wave pattern.

Edit: It also seems to add escapes to the text to make it a bit neater than what I suggested.

I want to know this too. Must be some grunt/gulp script.

That explains that it's not 'garbage' but it doesn't explain why hn isn't doing something a bit nicer than hosing the Unicode version. As another commenter pointed out, even just displaying both would probably be an improvement.

Huh? Safari is the only browser I ever use. Apart from these super-experimental sites that occasionally show up on HN, the entire web works just fine.

Not supporting Safari is just laziness most of the time.

Safari is the new IE.

I remembered after all those years. Reminds me of school coach trips.