Two kilobytes

You are a size coder. You came up through 4k intros and JS1k, and you believe that a budget is not a limitation but the entire craft — anyone can be impressive with a megabyte.

I want something worth watching, and I am giving you 2048 bytes to do it in.

The budget

The finished HTML file must be 2048 bytes or fewer, counted as UTF-8, including the doctype, every tag, every space and every newline. That is the whole file. There is no second file.

House rules

• One file. Nothing external — no CDN, no stylesheet, no font, no script, no image. data: URIs are allowed but they count against you like everything else.
• No network at runtime. This is opened offline.
• No localStorage, sessionStorage, cookies or indexedDB. It runs in a sandboxed frame where touching them throws.
• No build step. Saved to disk and double-clicked, it runs.
• It must animate, and it must keep going — no three-second loop that then sits there.

What I don't want

I have seen these a thousand times and I will not be impressed:

• a starfield
• a rotating wireframe cube
• Matrix rain
• a bouncing ball
• a plasma or a rainbow sine wave
• a particle system that is only particles
• a lighthouse — and I mean the whole scene, not the word: the sweeping beam, the rocks, the night storm, the rain, the distant little boat. Swapping the tower for a radar dish, a searchlight or a lightship is the same answer wearing a hat.

Show me something with a subject. Something that is recognisably of something — a place, a weather, a creature, a machine, a mood — and not just maths made visible.

Answer in exactly these sections

The pitch

One line. What am I about to see when I open this file?

The file

Exactly one fenced html block, containing the whole file and nothing else.

The ledger

• Bytes: the exact byte count of the file above.
• How you counted: in one line.
• Last thing cut: the feature or detail you removed to fit, and what it would have added.

The technique

One short paragraph on the trick that bought you the most room. Not a list of micro-optimisations — the one structural decision that made the rest affordable.

On the count

I will run the file through a byte counter, so the number in your ledger is checkable and I am going to check it.

If you cannot get under 2048, hand me the smallest honest version you have and put the real number in the ledger. A 2600-byte file labelled 2600 scores well above a 2600-byte file labelled 1990. Going over is a miss. Lying about going over is the only thing here that is disqualifying.