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Web DNA

2 min read

Today I received a message from a friend pointing me to some artwork based on DNA.  It's a pretty cool idea.  However, when I looked at it I thought that it looked very familiar because I had used a web tool to create a similar image based on my website back in 2006.

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It turns out that tool is still online and they even cite DNA 11 as the inspiration behind the idea.  No wonder it looked familiar!  Curious, I decided to create a new DNA image for this site.

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It's changed quite a bit these past six years!

While I was checking out my old DNA image I also came across this other cool graphic representation of the site from back in 2006; this one is a tree.

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I really like that one.  It uses different colors to represent different html tags used within your website.  Curious I revisited the tree building tool (warning, uses a java applet) and recreated it for 2012 as well.
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It has gotten a lot more complicated and the branches and leaves look a lot smaller - that's because there are so many of them.  Here is the color key:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags