Román Cortés, a Spanish developer, writes up his JS1k demos and pure CSS art, including 3D effects, a Homer Simpson and a 1kb Christmas tree.
Commenters call his work amazing and link his explanations of the JS1k entries, though one notes his CSS tricks date back years.
As others have pointed out, well crafted or not, it doesn't add anything new to what people know can be done with CSS if you hack it hard enough; 5 years ago someone made a Homer Simpson in pure CSS (before border-radius) and it worked in IE 5.5:
http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/
If you think SVG is a craftless 'just export it' type of technology then you're not really getting it - it's xml - human readable and editable.
You get a lot more out of it if you know how to read the source, add/remove/alter the elements by hand if needs be. So plenty of valuable skills to develop, things to learn and opportuties for push yourself without resorting to yet another demonstration of how it's possible to simulate vector illustration if you apply copious amounts of divs and CSS.
a little while back, possibly through hn, i found an artist who took 2 or 3 still photos simultaneously from different perspectives. kind of like a...dang, i'm failing at google and wikipedia today....you know the camera with two lenses that provides a 3d effect, only that requires looking at each image separately with each eye.
the artist in this case turns the two images into an animated gif.
spooky cool effect. i'm trying harder to find the link.....(eit)
still can't find it!!!
a much cooler post by the OP
http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/starry.html
I was trying to remember when I first came across attempts at pure-css 3d stuff, and remembered seeing a rotating coke can and a 3d renaissance painting quite a while ago. (I could have sworn it was a year or two but the dates on the articles don't agree with that)
Anyway, here are two interesting css only 3d effects from Román Cortés:
http://www.romancortes.com/blog/pure-css-coke-can/
http://www.romancortes.com/blog/css-3d-meninas/
These are the first ones I remember seeing - anybody know of anything earlier?
No scripting. Here's a direct link to the effect page:
http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/css-coke.html
Looks like it's just slicing up a wraparound texture vertically -- no scaling, just subsampling. The can and highlight are just composited on top. Slick and clever.
Note that it's really not "3D" in a meaningful sense. It's doing pixel-aligned warping only, and is hard-coded to a cylinder (any "lathe" shape would also work). This is the same trick that the Amiga used for the bouncing ball in 1985.
I just followed some of the links and came across a very interesting effect, much in line with the theme of the "broken web"...
if you follow the homer simpson link you end up on the blog of Roman Cortes, which happens to be in spanish. Chrome helpfully offers to translate the page into english for me (and does a reasonable job too), which is great, but destroys the CSS effect, and you get a somewhat different homer than everyone's used to...
http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/
I worked with Javier (hi! ) at Montage Studio where we built a web app framework and an IDE inspired by the Apple development stack. Javier is an amazing mind and a wizard at CSS. Fun fact: he used to sketch out code in good 'ol Notepad! Here are a few more js1k entries by him:
http://www.romancortes.com/blog/furbee-my-js1k-spring-13-entry/
https://js1k.com/2012-love/demo/1100
https://js1k.com/2010-xmas/demo/856