Progress

first sketch

Simple structure

Using display: flex

Shrinking the browser window randomly removes words from the sentence, one by one, in correspondence with the reduced pixel count.
Expanding the window brings words back, also at random, reconstructing the sentence into a new structure each time—never quite the same as before.

do tigers melt like butter in the forest?

do tigers melt like in the forest?

do tigers melt in the forest?

do tigers melt the forest?

tigers melt the forest?

tigers melt the forest

melt the forest

melt forest

melt

Do tigers melt like butter in the forest?

I want to try this exercise with a first sentence of question that I derived from a children’s book called The Story of Little Black Sambo published in UK 1899. Until not long ago, this book was quite popular in some countries like Korea and Japan and can still be found on bookshelves today. But for those familiar with it, it’s notoriously known for being blatantly racist due to its illustrations, its moronic backdrop, and the name of its characters.

Keeping this in mind, I find a kind of meta-ironic profundity in the story, completely independent of the author’s intention.

[more context to come]

How I want to develop it

I'm envisioning a kind of storybook that users can save the screens they like in the browser. once they're done, they can export them as a multi-paged pdf file containing all the screens they've saved in the browser. even print them out in the end.
Inspired by The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, I imagined adding random words as the browser window extends, rather than simply re-aligning previous words in the sentence as I did on my initial sketch.

This way, every time the user shrinks and then re-extends the browser window, a new word would subtly replace an old one--one at a time, gradually transforming the sentence with each interaction(of peekaboo).

Word-corresponding background illustration

Storybook in pdf

A button that allows users to save the current state of the browser window --not to the local computer, but within the browser itself.
Another button would then enable users to export these saved states as a PDF file, allowing them to print out each saved version of the browser window in chronological order.

To do

I should treat the continuously restructured sentences(the main prompter) not just as a block of text, but understand as a flexible, variable-based structure that logically aligns with CSS’s spatial and contextual interpretation.

The following analysis is needed:

identify the basic structure and elements of the sentence
define the possible combinatorial variables
structure these combinatory variables in a way that CSS can correspond
plus, I’d like to try incorporating the theatre metaphor from ‘Why CSS is so weird’ into the work:

regarding the browser window as a stage and apply the sentence analysis and structure accordingly.

identification
words	grammarly feature	semantic	stage role
do	auxiliary verb	check for action	??
tigers	noun	agenct	object
melt	verb	action	effect
like	preposition	comparison standard	condition modifier?
butter	noun	comparison target(object)	object
in	preposition	spatial relationship	positioning
the	determiner	-	-
forest	noun	context	backdrop
?	punctuation	sentence type	??

cambridge dictionary #grammar

Code to work 1

▲workflow
I made the first sketch by using an ai chatbot but I want to write the code without it from the beginning.

Code to work 2

▲with Doriane's help
try with the simplest approach to structuring html/java script, and richer iterations in CSS

Resource

Word combination algorithm

look for Permutation function
- Step-by-Step Guide to Array Permutation Using Recursion in JavaScript

Storybook in pdf

recommended by Joseph

try html2canvas for taking screenshot of the browser
look for javascript: Window: localStorage property for storage. (this one stores locally, but try it anyway)