Starter ideas and tips

If you're stuck on what to build or how to approach Tagless, here is a quick guide to help you choose the right tool for the job, along with some essential rules to keep in mind.

Choosing your approach

Depending on what you want to build, certain tools will make your life much easier:

Approach	Good for	Why?
Canvas 2D	Games, pixel art, data viz, animation	Direct pixel manipulation is fast and easy to conceptualize.
Three.js	3D portfolios, interactive art, demos	Wraps the complex math of WebGL into a friendly API.
React (no JSX)	Apps with state, forms, component trees	You get the power of React state without violating the tag ban.
CSS pseudo-elements	Art projects, minimalist pages	Lets you build a scene entirely out of CSS without any JS!
Rust + WASM	Performance-sensitive rendering, simulations	Run low-level systems code at near-native speeds in the browser.
p5.js	Generative art, creative coding sketches	Built-in physics, math, and color helpers specifically for art.
SVG via JS	Diagrams, charts, scalable illustrations	Infinitely scalable, crisp graphics driven by math.

Essential Tips and Rules

The Allowed Shell: The only literal HTML tags you can type anywhere in your source code are <html>, <head>, <body>, <meta>, <script>, <style>, and <canvas>.
Functions are fine: document.createElement is always allowed! It's a JavaScript function, not a literal HTML tag.
Namespaces matter: document.createElementNS is required when you want to create SVG or MathML nodes in JS, because they don't belong to the standard HTML namespace.
Watch out for backticks: No template literals containing tags! Typing `<div>${x}</div>` is an automatic fail.
Check your dependencies: Make sure any external libraries you import don't require you to write disallowed tags. For example, using the Three.js library is fine, but copy-pasting JSX from its docs is not.
Use Linters: Set up a simple grep or linter rule to catch stray < characters before you submit your project!