Posted by
Hemos
on from the reduce-reuse-recycle dept.
GFD writes: "The EETimes has a story about a relavtively old protocol for structured information call ASN.1 could be used to compress a 200 byte XML document to 2 bytes and few bits. I wonder if the same could be done with XHTML or even regular HTML."
HTML could be compressed
by
Restil
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
What you would lose is the readability. Any symbol in an html file could be reduced to a byte or less depending on the total number of symbols used. Consider a 80 character line of text with
each character a different color. For each character you'd need data approxately equal to:
a
This entire sequence could be compressed into 4 bytes or less, but you would require an html compiler instead of coding it by hand (unless you're one of those crazy people that prefer coding opcodes straight over using C).
The issue with html, and the reason why we don't worry about the inefficiency much is the fact that you could have a rather extensive html file with one link to a single picture, and that picture would easily take up the space of the entire html file.
Slashdot Mirror
What you would lose is the readability. Any symbol in an html file could be reduced to a byte or less depending on the total number of symbols used. Consider a 80 character line of text with
each character a different color. For each character you'd need data approxately equal to:
a
This entire sequence could be compressed into 4 bytes or less, but you would require an html compiler instead of coding it by hand (unless you're one of those crazy people that prefer coding opcodes straight over using C).
The issue with html, and the reason why we don't worry about the inefficiency much is the fact that you could have a rather extensive html file with one link to a single picture, and that picture would easily take up the space of the entire html file.
-Restil
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