http://www.willamette.edu/htbin/tic-tac-toe (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)

Tic Tac Toe

Eric's WWW Tic-Tac-Toe Game!

Your turn to play -- click on the board below to make a move:

Hopefully the above will either show up as a graphic image or a text-based game, depending on the capabilities of your browser. Let me know if doesn't work -- it seems to work, at least, with both Lynx and Mosaic.

This is a silly hack that you can blame on John Callahan, who suggested it to me, and then gave me a book on Perl. Although I originally scoffed, I went back and did it anyway.

I regard this as an experiment into the possibilities of the Web, especially with features like the htbin. All of the permuations of this document, text or graphics, win or tie, are all generated by the same peice of code. While tic-tac-toe may not be very exciting by itself, the fact that I can write what is essentially a "smart document" is extremely exciting. It makes me wonder whether there might be a better way to create documents that are capable of doing more then simply display themselves -- perhaps some kind of document programming language?

If you'd like to see the source code, take a look here. Be warned, depending on which part you look at, I'm either really proud or really embarrassed of it >=)

James "Eric" Tilton, Big Fan of Perl, jtilton@willamette.edu