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I really can't tell if this is satire. But either everyone is in on the joke and out to get naive people like me (in that case, well played) or Hacker News does

I really can't tell if this is satire. But either everyone is in on the joke and out to get naive people like me (in that case, well played) or Hacker News does not seem to think so. I don't think there is one single use case, on any scale, anywhere in the world, where saving up to 17% on a minimized css file before gzip would matter in the slightest, let alone while adding 20mins to your build cycle :)

cobookman 10y ago
Saving 17% on a the google.com, Facebook.com, and Amazon.com CSS files would make a difference. Now that also depends on what the TCP packet size is. For example saving 1Byte might not lessen the amount of network traffic needing to be sent.
- quakenul 10y ago
  I very much doubt 17% before gzip on a already minimized css file would make any meaningful difference, to anyone. Check out the compression example on https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-and-gzipping/ https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-a...
- underwater 10y ago
  This discussion reminds me of this exploration into compressing JSON data. Unless you're considering the final gzipped size you're doing it wrong: "In short, if you try to eliminate redundancy by applying some kind of clever transformation or restructuring your data object before piping it to gzip, you will probably just do a crappy job of reimplementing gzip at the wrong layer of abstraction, and get worse results overall." -- https://github.com/wincent/relay/blob/hack/contrib/lightweight-results/README.md https://github.com/wincent/relay/blob/hack/contrib/lightweig...
  - jordanwallwork 10y ago
    That's a really good point. A minified that output code directly optimised to gzip efficiently would be a great thing
remy_luisant 10y ago
Won't anyone think of the bytes! I'd call this half-satire. Half joke. Half thought experiment. The idea is that you can run this once, benefit forever. I'm myself in a need of a website that fits under 14K because I'm insane or something. Saving bytes might start to matter.

cobookman 10y ago

Saving 17% on a the google.com, Facebook.com, and Amazon.com CSS files would make a difference. Now that also depends on what the TCP packet size is. For example saving 1Byte might not lessen the amount of network traffic needing to be sent.

quakenul 10y ago
I very much doubt 17% before gzip on a already minimized css file would make any meaningful difference, to anyone. Check out the compression example on https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-and-gzipping/ https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-a...
underwater 10y ago
This discussion reminds me of this exploration into compressing JSON data. Unless you're considering the final gzipped size you're doing it wrong: "In short, if you try to eliminate redundancy by applying some kind of clever transformation or restructuring your data object before piping it to gzip, you will probably just do a crappy job of reimplementing gzip at the wrong layer of abstraction, and get worse results overall." -- https://github.com/wincent/relay/blob/hack/contrib/lightweight-results/README.md https://github.com/wincent/relay/blob/hack/contrib/lightweig...
- jordanwallwork 10y ago
  That's a really good point. A minified that output code directly optimised to gzip efficiently would be a great thing

remy_luisant 10y ago

Won't anyone think of the bytes! I'd call this half-satire. Half joke. Half thought experiment. The idea is that you can run this once, benefit forever. I'm myself in a need of a website that fits under 14K because I'm insane or something. Saving bytes might start to matter.