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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Looking at modern day web development we are seeing the opposite, where the program is many times bigger than it's output

You're seriously underestimating the size of output in a web browser. Consider that the CSS, JS and HTML describe the position of every pixel and its motion on the screen.

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Not just the size of a given output, but the space of possible outputs. I am also of the opinion that webdev is bloated and miserable, but it is still a massive compression of the information it represents.

I don't really buy that acres of whitespace and gradients really describe much information.

Considered at the boundary of your awareness--in that you are mostly unaware of all the pixels on the page, then absolutely not true. A typical news article might be a few KB of text but MBs and MBs of images that you never look at.

I'm talking about Shannon Information specifically. In which case, acres of whitespace and gradients very much are information. Calling them "whitespace" and "gradients" is a significant act of compression in and of itself.

I understand your argument, but even then I don't think it's quite right; there is lots of room to improve on the size of a webpage vs its rendered pixels on the screen, even with the fancy fonts and gradients and animations. I still don't believe it's really megabytes. Have you seen 4k demo contests, btw? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w_xEUoK79o

Yes, I agree. I also realised it wasn't really accurate of me of comparing an applied theory to the theoretical theory, as the author calls it.

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