The Page With No Code

[Dan Q]

I accidentally came across a stupid experiment I did back in 2023. It's called The Page With No Code.

It's a Web page that looks like this:

But if you "View Source", it has no code whatsoever. Whaaa?

Sadly nowadays it only works in Firefox.

The "black magic" it uses is as follows:

• Your browser gets a blank page, which it assumes is a typo so it treats it as if it says <html><head></head><body></body></html>
• The server sends a Link: header which delivers (or references, now, to work around a different bug that turned up one day) some CSS.
• That CSS uses ::before, ::after, and content: '...' to "fake" the content!

Anyway: I enjoyed re-discovering this stupid experiment and thought you might enjoy it too. I wrote more about it here.

[lakes]

The page doesn't look how I thought it would.
I thought it'd look like those "black text on white" minimal websites you'd sometimes see either on the indie web now or in the 90s.

[virtualpet2001]

This is fun, I figured out it was css but i didn't know that the server could hand it to you without it being specified in the html itself
out of curiosity, what part of the equation makes this only work in firefox? does "now" imply that it worked in more browsers when you first made it???

[Dan Q]

what part of the equation makes this only work in firefox? does "now" imply that it worked in more browsers when you first made it???

To deliver the CSS without having a <link> or <style> tag (which would require HTML code!), I use a Link: HTTP header. In the initial version, I just sent Link: <data:...>; rel="stylesheet", containing a Base64-encoded copy of the CSS, but I had to change it a few years later when I switched webserver software and my new webserver software couldn't cope with headers that long! So now it passes a URL to a CSS file in the Link: header instead.

But specifying CSS using a Link: header wasn't ever widely supported. Firefox and its derivatives is the only mainstream browser left that does so (though I think pre-Blink Opera could do it too). I was so excited when I thought of it, because there are all kinds of interesting things you could do with Link:-based CSS, but sadly it looks like Chromium-based browsers aren't ever going to support it anyway.

[Rubbereon]

My first thought seeing this was "Can ai chatbots parse this?!" if it's a 'no', I would very much love to do what you did (although the html will be filled with code instead of completely empty, divs, spans, all of that sweet stuff)

The only problem would be seo because crawlers likely also resort to reading the html content itself, but given that my website barely shows up in search results as it is I'm not sure if I should care.

[poesu]

It doesn't work right now  What happened?

[Dan Q]

It doesn't work right now  What happened?

Works fine for me. What browser are you using? Note that it only promises support for Firefox...

[poesu]

I remember first opening it in Brave, and it worked, weird! Opened in Librewolf, and yep, it works fine there. Sorry!