This website is a wordle clone optimized for NCSA Mosaic, the first browser to ever exist. This means:
This means there is zero interactivity and no ability to create basic layouts. It's basically a glorified text viewer. It's only in the later versions that forms were introduced.
If you want a slightly more modern version but drop NCSA support, click here
The question of course is now:
How to implement a game in a browser not meant to play games?
The answer to this is: Url parameters and images.
Yes, mosaic does support gif and jpeg images.
This gives us the ability to implement
Image support is kinda primitive and slow.
The browser only loads a gif if the URL path ends in the .gif extension.
To solve that problem, a bit of scripting on the server was used to
trick it into executing a PHP file when a certain image was requested.
The image generator makes simple squares with a single letter inside, and combines them into a single horizontal strip. Mosaic is slow when it comes to image loading, so letters shown on the same line are combined into a single image. This however destroys the ability to use the images as links for text input. To combat this, a list of clickable letters is provided below the alphabet itself.
You have to guess the secret 5 character word within 6 attempts.
After you make a guess, the background of letters in your word are colored in either
white, green, or yellow.
A white letter does not appear anywhere in the word.
A green letter appears in the correct position.
A yellow letter is in the word but not the correct position.
Double letters are handled correctly.
If the hidden word is CADET and you guess
TESTS the first T will be yellow and the second T will be white.
No attempt is consumed if you guess a word that is not in the list.
The first 2 or 3 guesses should be used to eliminate as many letters as possible
unless you have very strong hints for the solution after the first guess already.
How many words are possible is shown below the game table.
At the top are the guesses you've already made. Below is the alphabet you can use to make guesses. You can click on letters to add them to the next guess. Once you pick 5 letters you get a link to commit your guess.
Word hints are disabled by default.
You can enable and disable them to get a list of possible solutions
below the game.
Words in the hints can be clicked on to use
a word as the next guess without having to click individual letters.
A game always starts with word hints disabled.
The game keeps a list of all words possible according to your guesses. The "educated guessing" button picks one of the possible words as your next guess.
The word hint is fairly smart.
It takes all hints (white, yellow, green) into account.
It also handles yellow hints correctly
by filtering words that do contain the letter but not at the given position.
The only hint so far that it disregards is when you guess a word like
TASTY and the result shows that only one T exists in the solution.