Imagine a digital chameleon: a file that combines ZIP, HTML, and PNG into one versatile format. It can be displayed as a web page, unzipped like an archive, or viewed as an image. Discover an innovative approach to sharing and storing web content, and learn how to create these polyglot files in JavaScript!
You can view the web presentation in:
Press F1 during the presentation to see the keyboard shortcuts.
If you are using a Chromium-based or a WebKit-based browser to view the first examples from the presentation, you should install the extension from the zip file located in util/web-extension in order to add the support of file:// URIs in the Fetch API. Alternatively, you can view the examples via an HTTP server.
Here is the resulting self-extracting HTML file: demo.png.zip.html
This file and the presentation files are compatible with:
- HTML (extracted page displayed in no-quirks mode)
- ZIP (contains the displayed page and its resources) - rename the file to
.zipand view it with ZIP Manager - PNG - rename the file to
.pngand view it with PNG file chunk inpector
If you are intrigued or more curious, you can also view it on HexEd.it.
The presentation explains how to generate this file and the technical challenges involved.
The image displayed at the center of the page demo.png.zip.html when viewed in HTML is the page itself, but interpreted as a PNG file (cf. the <img src="#" ...> tag).
- A bug in "Archive Utility" on macOS prevents it from decompressing the resulting file. You can use
unzipto get around this issue. - Depending on the browser you're using, the presentation may be a little slow.
This presentation is dedicated to my biggest supporter on this project. Many thanks @ljonathanl, we miss your enthusiasm and creativity.