Simon Willison’s Weblog

10K Apart Contest: Cheating by Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images. Fascinating hack: transform your JS and CSS in to coloured pixels, save the result as a PNG to benefit from PNG’s built in compression algorithms, then read the data back out of the PNG and convert it back to text using JavaScript and canvas—all to reduce the on-disk filesize when entering the 10K app competition. Alex’s GithubFinder entry is worth checking out too.

# 23rd August 2010, 9:45 am / 10kapart, alex-le, compression, github, hacks, javascript, png, recovered

SPDY: The Web, Only Faster. Alex Russell explains the benefits of Google’s SPDF proposal (a protocol that upgrades HTTP)—including header compression, multiplexing, the ability to send additional resources such as images and stylesheets down without needing the data:uri hack and Comet support built in to the core assumptions of the protocol.

# 13th November 2009, 1 pm / alex-russell, google, http, spdy, compression, datauri, comet

Packing Prototype. Why Prototype doesn’t ship with an official compressed version.

# 17th May 2007, 9:52 am / prototype, javascript, javascript-libraries, compression, packing