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The thing about html is that it's a verbose text format on the surface, but it compresses incredibly easily, and support for gzip is widespread. If you're conce

The thing about html is that it's a verbose text format on the surface, but it compresses incredibly easily, and support for gzip is widespread. If you're concerned about size, brotli is better again.

codeflo 4y ago
> The thing about html is that it's a verbose text format on the surface, but it compresses incredibly easily, and support for gzip is widespread. If you're concerned about size, brotli is better again. That's why I said it wastes 15%, not 100%. Whenever text-based formats and binary formats are compared, the results after compression (of both) are usually in that range. You can debate those precise numbers, they might be lower for the brotli/HTML combination. That won't really change the point I was making in context: That a few extra bytes for backwards compatibility in the TLS handshake pale in comparison to the amount of waste we accept for encoding the payload.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  I dare to say that human readability that accounts for that extra size allowed many people to learn basics about how internet works, namely HTML and its compatriots. Mankind would be poorer for this enriching experience, even if it resides mostly in the past, and for me personally 15% (or 100% extra) could easily justify that. Plus add easiness of debugging this (before you bring some javascript monstrosity that hacks around it and will stop working probably in weeks after paid support of it ends)
  - toomim 4y ago
    A better example is HTTP, which is text, but read by humans much less frequently.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Only HTTP/0.9 HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 are probably text in the sense you mean HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are binary formats, they are semantically very similar to the older formats in some sense, but you would benefit from more tools to examine them properly because human readability was not the priority.
- philsnow 4y ago
  You’re saying that compressed HTML, because it is text, wastes 15% (could be however much, the number doesn’t really matter) over some binary format that would express the same content? What binary format would/could that be? I’m just not seeing how (if it expresses the same content) it could be smaller than compressed HTML.
  - foobazgt 4y ago
    They're comparing compressed text vs compressed binary, apples to apples. While text compresses amazingly well, binaries aren't 100% entropic themselves. They usually also benefit from compression. For example, the defacto "executable" format for the Java runtime is a compressed archive (jar file).
- foobiekr 4y ago
  The compression doesn’t help memory usage or cache locality on the receiving end. Http is terrible and JSON and other web technologies are terrible. The whole concept of how to write efficient code and the resulting performance left on the table by terrible coders is enormous. A terrible waste.
Szpadel 4y ago
the thing is that you need additional CPU power to compress and decompress that data, maybe that is not much by today standards, but when accumulated it could be a significant number
- szundi 4y ago
  The alternatives are not free either and would accumulate different costs probably as well

codeflo 4y ago

> The thing about html is that it's a verbose text format on the surface, but it compresses incredibly easily, and support for gzip is widespread. If you're concerned about size, brotli is better again. That's why I said it wastes 15%, not 100%. Whenever text-based formats and binary formats are compared, the results after compression (of both) are usually in that range. You can debate those precise numbers, they might be lower for the brotli/HTML combination. That won't really change the point I was making in context: That a few extra bytes for backwards compatibility in the TLS handshake pale in comparison to the amount of waste we accept for encoding the payload.

saiya-jin 4y ago
I dare to say that human readability that accounts for that extra size allowed many people to learn basics about how internet works, namely HTML and its compatriots. Mankind would be poorer for this enriching experience, even if it resides mostly in the past, and for me personally 15% (or 100% extra) could easily justify that. Plus add easiness of debugging this (before you bring some javascript monstrosity that hacks around it and will stop working probably in weeks after paid support of it ends)
- toomim 4y ago
  A better example is HTTP, which is text, but read by humans much less frequently.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Only HTTP/0.9 HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 are probably text in the sense you mean HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are binary formats, they are semantically very similar to the older formats in some sense, but you would benefit from more tools to examine them properly because human readability was not the priority.
philsnow 4y ago
You’re saying that compressed HTML, because it is text, wastes 15% (could be however much, the number doesn’t really matter) over some binary format that would express the same content? What binary format would/could that be? I’m just not seeing how (if it expresses the same content) it could be smaller than compressed HTML.
- foobazgt 4y ago
  They're comparing compressed text vs compressed binary, apples to apples. While text compresses amazingly well, binaries aren't 100% entropic themselves. They usually also benefit from compression. For example, the defacto "executable" format for the Java runtime is a compressed archive (jar file).
foobiekr 4y ago
The compression doesn’t help memory usage or cache locality on the receiving end. Http is terrible and JSON and other web technologies are terrible. The whole concept of how to write efficient code and the resulting performance left on the table by terrible coders is enormous. A terrible waste.

Szpadel 4y ago

the thing is that you need additional CPU power to compress and decompress that data, maybe that is not much by today standards, but when accumulated it could be a significant number

szundi 4y ago
The alternatives are not free either and would accumulate different costs probably as well