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I agree with the sentiment but not with the arguments put forward. It's just a little ironic that the first example put forward (carvings in a stone tablet) is

I agree with the sentiment but not with the arguments put forward. It's just a little ironic that the first example put forward (carvings in a stone tablet) is represented as a jpg image. Even the text of the article itself, considering the point of view of the pixels stored in the graphics buffer, takes just as much space as any other image. Arguably, all text is image, but that's a huge discussion. Is there really less information required to represent text than data? It just seems easier to encode ascii text because we've settled on an encoding schema that optimizes for the english alphabet. The example of the twitter icon using 2000 bytes is only because the author decided to use a png. Using the font-awesome typeface, the twitter icon is just 2 bytes. And I can whip up in 5 minutes a typeface where the twitter logo uses 1 byte. We can come up with an encoding format where dingbats and logos take up 1 byte and the english alphabet uses 2TB. It'd be a useless encoding for practical purposes, but goes against the idea that text is inherently more informationally compact than images.

fao_ 11y ago
It's just a little ironic that the first example put forward (carvings in a stone tablet) is represented as a jpg image. But the author clearly states: "If you can use text for something, use it"; this is obviously one of the areas where the author used their discretion and decided to use an image to help illustrate the point. The author isn't stating "Don't use images", but "Use text wherever it is possible". EDIT: It seems weird that HN doesn't have a facility to toggle line wrapping in quotes.
- ColinWright 11y ago
  When you indent something it is asked that the formatting is important and so retains it. If the formatting is not important, and you don't mind the machine putting in line breaks for you, don't indent.
lvh 11y ago
I don't think that's a valid argument for informational density. You have to whip up that font where something interesting maps to a low code point and then share it ahead of time before you can take advantage of that alleged density. As an extreme example: if I create a Huffman tree where the bit string "1" maps to the entire concatenated contents of the Library of Congress, does that affect the information density of the Library of Congress?
- shuzchen 11y ago
  But I'm not exactly making an argument for information density, except that "it's kinda a weird thing and we probably don't know how to calculate it without assuming a whole lotta things". In my opinion, your extreme example actually supports my argument. Yes, you have to "share it ahead of time", but that's precisely what happened with the ascii encoding. It's just ascii is built into most systems by default and codified by a standards body, whereas our ad-hoc encoding is not. But does that mean ascii is inherently denser? I wouldn't use ascii to communicate with aliens because to understand it you require knowledge of the majority of the english language (again, english knowledge is shared ahead of time). In fact, the Voyager Golden Record has line drawings on the cover, and not a single character.

fao_ 11y ago

It's just a little ironic that the first example put forward (carvings in a stone tablet) is represented as a jpg image. But the author clearly states: "If you can use text for something, use it"; this is obviously one of the areas where the author used their discretion and decided to use an image to help illustrate the point. The author isn't stating "Don't use images", but "Use text wherever it is possible". EDIT: It seems weird that HN doesn't have a facility to toggle line wrapping in quotes.

ColinWright 11y ago
When you indent something it is asked that the formatting is important and so retains it. If the formatting is not important, and you don't mind the machine putting in line breaks for you, don't indent.

lvh 11y ago

I don't think that's a valid argument for informational density. You have to whip up that font where something interesting maps to a low code point and then share it ahead of time before you can take advantage of that alleged density. As an extreme example: if I create a Huffman tree where the bit string "1" maps to the entire concatenated contents of the Library of Congress, does that affect the information density of the Library of Congress?

shuzchen 11y ago
But I'm not exactly making an argument for information density, except that "it's kinda a weird thing and we probably don't know how to calculate it without assuming a whole lotta things". In my opinion, your extreme example actually supports my argument. Yes, you have to "share it ahead of time", but that's precisely what happened with the ascii encoding. It's just ascii is built into most systems by default and codified by a standards body, whereas our ad-hoc encoding is not. But does that mean ascii is inherently denser? I wouldn't use ascii to communicate with aliens because to understand it you require knowledge of the majority of the english language (again, english knowledge is shared ahead of time). In fact, the Voyager Golden Record has line drawings on the cover, and not a single character.