Conway’s Game of Life in HTML 4

SixFootTallRabbit just put together a very nice implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using HTML 5’s canvas element as seen here.

Having put together a maze generator using HTML 4, I was certain an equally as aesthetically pleasing Game of Life implementation could be written in plain HTML 4. While this version isn’t quite as slick nor quite as performant as the canvas element’s implementation, the results are pretty decent.

This should be usable in all the latest versions of all major browsers, and so offers a way of running the automaton in a browser without the need of plug-ins or applets.

Note: IE8 has a problem with onMouseOver handling that is apparently well-known. There is no work around that I could find, so “painting” cells is very slow, but individual cells can still be clicked on. It also runs much slower than Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari, so consider switching browsers for a better experience.