The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: “Play, don’t show”, riffing off the typical “Show, don’t tell” rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector and let you poke at things yourself!

Previously, this series was known as “Xplain” and was more focused on the X11 window system and protocol, but I’ve been slowly moving towards anything that interests me, and I’m hijacking this project for it since I really like the format and style I’ve developed. The code for every single one of these demos is available in the GitHub repo, and I do try to comment heavily and go into even more depth there! Play with the code! Use it for one of your own projects! It’s all MIT/X11 licensed. I very much appreciate followup questions and any sort of feedback through the links mentioned above.

You might have noticed that when you ran your mouse over the stipple, your cursor changed. That’s because this isn’t just any old stipple image, that stipple is actually the background of a full X server session running in your browser using HTML5 canvas. All of the interactive demos will use this framework to explain what’s going on under the hood.

Author comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041340

source: L