Applies to all formal languages actually. 2^(8x20x10^6) ~= 2x10^48164799 is such a ridiculously large space...
A typical web page of text on a screen is about a kilobyte. Sure, you can pack more in with fine print, and obviously additional data is required to represent the styling, but the actual text is about 1 kb.
If you've sent 20 MB, then that is 20,000x more data than what was displayed on the screen.
Worse still, an uncompressed 4K still image is only 23.7 megabytes. At some point you might be better off doing "server side rendering" with a GPU instead of sending more JavaScript!
Some 7~10 years ago I remember I saw somewhere (maybe here on HN) a website which did exactly this: you gave it an URL - it downloaded a webpage with all its resources, rendered and screenshot'ed it (probably in headless Chrome or something), and compared size of png screenshot versus size of webpage with all its resources.
For many popular websites, png screenshot of a page indeed was several times less than webpage itself!
You can even swap in your own shared dictionary with a HTTP header, but trying to make your own dictionary specific to your content is a fool’s errand, you’ll never amortize the cost in total bits.
What you CAN do with shared dictionaries though, is delta updates.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/shared-dictionary-compress... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39615198