Hey, do you loathe Instagram? Do you think the twee application of filters to make your photos look bad in order to insulate yourself from criticism should be extended to everything? Then good news! Soon you’ll be able to Instagram your website! We’ve taken the liberty of mocking up an example at right.
Specifically, you’ll be able to use Webkit and CSS effects. For those unfamiliar, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. HTML is the actual content of the site, CSS is how its presented on your browser. And now you’ll be able to, say, turn an image on the site blurry, or make it a sepia tone, or control its saturation. Yes, you can Instagram it.
Google has even done us the “favor” of designing the latest build of Chrome to use our GPU to accelerate these effects, so not only can we be annoyed by them, they can put some wear and tear on our computers and possibly reintroduce websites that load at a crawl. Hooray.
The power and flexibility of this is undeniably neat and when it’s used well, it’ll be amazing. When it’s used terribly, which it will be a lot more often, we’ll be cursing the name of whoever put this into Webkit. Either way, brace yourselves: crappier looking websites are just over the horizon.
(Image courtesy Caveman Chuck Coker on Flickr with some modification)