3 ms·

For that matter why bother having a text encoding at all? We could just send pictures of text to each other right?

• chriswarbo 11y ago
  > For that matter why bother having a text encoding at all? We could just send pictures of text to each other right? This is of course a straw man which has nothing to do with my question. However, it's not actually clear what you mean. If you mean that we could make small pictures of individual characters and send those, well that's exactly what text encoding is; it's an implementation detail whether we specify a character as a unicode code point, or a URI (possibly relative, to allow fonts as namespaces). If you mean sending one big picture of a piece of text, well that's what already happens. Rather than using PNG, we can get better quality and compression ratio by using the "plain text" image format. This only works well when we know that the image only contains text, otherwise we lose a lot of quality (e.g. see http://www.asciiworld.com http://www.asciiworld.com )