But seriously, folks

I first read about this (obviously impractical) method many years ago, in one place or another. I think it may have been in The Next Book of Omni Games, which I treasured for a time as a teenager. Another friend suspects it first came from Martin Gardner's Aha! Insight. I have neither of these volumes on hand as I write this, and would of course welcome any definitive word on the origin of this thought experiment.

Update: I learn through a helpful informant that Gardner's follow-up book Aha! Gotcha originally contained the story of an alien visitor who encodes the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a single, straight scratch on a metal rod.

Anyway, I don't recall anyone ever using JavaScript and CSS to actually build a working example of the silly idea, so I did. The original description predates the invention of modern digital text encoding (such as today's ubiquitous UTF-8), and I found a delightful puzzle in the prospect of developing a robust implementation that would work in a web browser.

I invite those wondering why I limit the input to only a few hundred characters to experiment with this method without this restriction. (The theory behind it really does support texts of indeterminite length, after all!)

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Informatimago on Hacker News expresses informed skepticism.

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