I wrote this page in HTML, CSS and Javascript to see if the combination could be adapted to make an interesting and fast cellular automaton Traditionally a language of mundane applications, Javascript has been coming out of its shell as Google, Mozilla and others use it in new areas of application development. This page makes heavy use of Javascript's functional language features. It also makes many more dynamically generated changes in appearance than most web sites. I expect this sort of extremely dynamic presentation will become more common as projects like Mozilla's Tamarin interpreter reach maturity.
For the curious: this is a Belousov-Zhabotinsky cellular automaton. It very roughly simulates a chemical oscillator. It's a pretty simple concept that's been around since the 1940s courtesy of John von Neumann: cells are arranged in a grid. Each cell evolves over time depending on what its neighbors are evolving into. This use of "evolve" came into vogue in the 1970s with Conway's Game of Life automaton. Conway's automaton vaguely mimicked predator and prey populations in nature. Cellular automata in general are purely computational, but can mimic many natural phenomena beyond simple predator-prey dynamics. Neumann invented them to study crystal growth. Some look like growing plants, others like fire. On both concrete and theoretical levels, they are a profound link between nature, math, computing, and complexity.