[Cthulhu_]

It's a tradeoff; in a lot of cases, the size of a .jar doesn't really matter because it ends up on big web containers.

It does matter for e.g. Android apps though. But at the same time, the size of the eventual .jar is something that can be optimized by Google / the Android store as well, using what you just described for starters.

I know Apple's app store will optimize an app and its resources for the device that downloads it. As a developer you have to provide all image resources in three sizes / pixel densities for their classes of devices. They also support modular apps now, that download (and offload) resources on demand (e.g. level 2 and beyond of a game, have people get past level 1 first before downloading the rest).

[hinkley]

It's true, but this was brought up as an anecdote/parallel.

Attributes in html have no fixed order, and neither do constants in a class file. There are multiple ways to reorder them that help out or hinder DEFLATE.

And also I was compressing the hell out of JAR files because they were going onto an embedded device, so 2k actually meant I could squeeze a few more features in.