Shredder

a recreation of Mark Napier's Shredder 1.0 (1998)

The web is not a printed page. Underneath every tidy layout is a stream of raw material — markup, headers, scripts, links, colors — that the browser politely hides from you. The Shredder reads that stream and refuses to be polite.

Give it a URL and it fetches the page's raw HTTP response, then re-renders it as an abstract composition: the source code chopped into diagonal strips of overlapping type, the images squeezed into thin slivers and tiling columns, the links scattered as live fragments, the palette harvested from the colors the page itself declares. Every shred is different; the randomness is seeded, so a permalink reproduces the same one.

Type an address in the Location: box above (no http:// needed) and press Enter — or pick something from the Bookmarks list. Links inside a shred are alive: click one and it gets shredded too.

Nothing about the original page is preserved out of respect. Text may be unreadable, images mangled, structure destroyed. That is the point.

Original artwork: Mark Napier, Shredder 1.0 (1998) — still running at potatoland.org/shredder.
This is an independent local recreation of its algorithm, built for study and homage.