A couple of days ago, I thought it would be fun to revisit this old idea. I don't intend this to have any practical application, but it is fun in a geeky sort of way. I felt compelled to present this example in the spirit of Rene Magritte "The Treachery of Images".

What you see here is not a pipe, nor is it an image of a pipe. It is an HTML table. The background color of each cell produces the effect of a pixel. For example, here is the code for one pixel <td bgcolor="#fffbff"></td>. The size of each table data cell is defined in a style section in the head of the html page. A real pipe like this is for sale at www.kalyna.ca

Here is a link to the original Perl script. This script requires a parameter for the image and supports an optional parameter for the pixel size. For example, ./image_to_table.pl pipe.png > pipe.html. You will need to install the Perl ImageMagick module. I decided to do some optimizations. I wrote a new version of the script that looks for opportunities to use the colspan attribute. This significantly reduced the size of the tables. Here are some additional images:

Compression!

I just learned that IE and FireFox both support gzipped html pages! The compression ratio is fairly good. So, here are the stats: