Arc Reactor CSS Exercise

The Iron Man Arc Reactor CSS Exercises (formerly known as "Iron Style") are a set of stylized divs on an HTML page, first developed in 2010, for purposes of testing CSS 3 implementation in browsers. The page is now released on the Dozerfleet Labs official blog for download, as a web toy.

In 2010
Originally dubbed "Iron Style," this web toy used the release of Iron Man 2 as an excuse to test out how far along Cascading Style Sheet tech had come; by virtue of asking a simple question:

"Can I, without any JavaScript, create purely out of code, a markup simulation of an arc reactor that can turn on or off?"

In early June of 2010, that exercise was first put to the test. Three different arc reactor fields were then generated to the page. One was a basic arc reactor design made of a gradient circle, and turning on and glowing gradually when hovered over via CSS animation. This was styled after the first Iron Man film. The second was a triangle-shaped chestpiece, modeled after the one seen on the Mk. VI armor near the end of Iron Man 2. Finally, a War Machine version was created. While the HTML file was left alone after June 9th of 2010 around 10:55 PM EDT, the CSS file attached to it continued to be tweaked until August 6th of that same year, around 7:20 PM EDT.

The classic "Iron Style" toy was developed in Apartment #165 of Drakeshire Apartments in Farmington, MI.

In 2021
Some revisions were made to the exercise in early June of 2021, after the exercise was rediscovered and experimented with using features to become available in browsers since then. The drastic revision was published to the Dozerfleet Labs official blog around June 6th of 2021.

Limitations

 * Since gradients don't transition well during animations in CSS as of the time this toy was re-created in 2021, browsers of its time will not be able to translate a perfect color transition from the arc reactor gradient to a glowing white ball of energy. Instead, the gradient turns to transparency, then to solid white gradually.  Animation frames have been altered since 2010 to speed up the process, and this flaw is less noticeable.


 * This exercise uses only code, no actual bitmap or true SVG graphics. As such, the Arc Reactors don't look entirely movie-accurate.


 * Only the first two Iron Man films are considered for this exercise. Nothing in Iron Man 3 or any later Marvel film is considered.


 * This toy was never officially endorsed by Marvel.

External link

 * Arc Reactor CSS Exercises at Dozerfleet Labs