This Page Is a Quine (2021)

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

ycombyourhair

53 points

8 comments

pranavg.meTechstory

calmpositive

Debate

20/100

QuineHTMLCSS

Key topics

Quine

HTML

CSS

The page 'This Page Is a Quine' showcases a clever HTML/CSS quine, sparking discussion among HN users about similar projects and the techniques used to achieve this effect.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Moderate engagement

First comment

Peak period

78-84h

Avg / period

Key moments

01Story posted
Aug 31, 2025 at 5:52 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Sep 3, 2025 at 1:53 PM EDT
3d after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
7 comments in 78-84h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Sep 3, 2025 at 7:36 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (8 comments)

Showing 8 comments

omoikane

4 months ago

1 reply

> This page works on all browsers

But on Lynx, it's rendered as only a plain page without all the CSS style bits to make it quine.

_ache_

4 months ago

I suspect Lynx isn't very sophisticated because I just tried with curl and it works like a charm.

quuxplusone

4 months ago

1 reply

The trick is `* {display:block;}`. Having learned that, I wondered whether https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html used the same trick. So I opened up the page and Ctrl+F'ed for "display:". Nothing came up! Back to https://pranavg.me/ and Ctrl+F'ed for "display". Nothing came up!

Apparently, at least on Chrome, Ctrl+F will not find text inside a <style> block, no matter whether it's displayed or not.

Ctrl+F works even to find text inside the displayed <head> and <title> elements, but not inside the displayed <style> element. What could be the browser-writer's rationale for this? And are there any other HTML elements that "suppress searching" like this?

sltkr

4 months ago

Curious.

Interesting enough, document.body.innerText does contain the style sheet contents, so the browser does consider it visible text in some sense.

m-hodges

4 months ago

I appreciate how many GEB references are hitting HN lately :)

ImJasonH

4 months ago

Similar to this, a long time ago I tried to make some CSS that rendered HTML as Markdown: https://gist.github.com/imjasonh/c00cdd7aece6945fb8ea

defaultcompany

4 months ago

Not from the same guy but here's a quine embedded in the github contribution chart:

https://github.com/mame?tab=overview&from=1970-12-01&to=1970...

tomhow

4 months ago

A similar post from 2019, discussed twice on HN:

This page is a truly naked, brutalist HTML quine (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32968597 - Sept 2022 (44 comments)

Show HN: This page is a truly naked, brutalist HTML quine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20094866 - June 2019 (94 comments)

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ID: 45081904Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:54:29 PM

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