Ayyy that's a much more articulate way to put what I was also thinking.

"Being constructed of text characters" is a very loose definition of ASCII art. Not to say it's not visually interesting, but just that it's on the far ends of the histogram of what people think of when they hear "ASCII art".

Personally, I think the fact this is relying on colour for contrast makes this feel more like a shader that quantizes the input into little dots that just happen to be 1 of 3 characters, than ASCII Art. It's a vague border between that and an ASCII shader, and then ASCII art, but there's definitely some measureable distance between those peaks.

▲

wuliwong 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What do you think they should have called it? Any suggestion that is an unfamiliar term would mean that almost nobody would have clicked on the link and therefore it would not have risen to the top of HN and therefore none of us would even know this exists. I think I think I can accept a loose definition of ASCII art for actually being able to see this page.

(=ᵔᗜᵔ=)

	▲	graypegg 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nahhhh you don't need a new term. It's just like... on the fringes of what the term means. I'd call it an "ASCII-Art inspired shader", but some % of people would look at it and immediately call it "ASCII Art" with no confusion. Some other % of people are also going to scoff at me saying it's "ASCII-Art inspired" at all. Should mention, I have no issue with this little project! I'm just agreeing with the parent comment that this is just hinting at the limitations of ASCII art without actually working with them, in our opinion. Thinking about art being an important step in appreciating art, and all of that.
	▲	ghurtado 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So your point is that it's cool to misrepresent what things actually are in order to promote them, because if you were honest about what it actually is, nobody would be interested?