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by robocat 1618 days ago
More importantly, I would expect #00ff00 to compress better than green, because it would usually make the CSS file more predictably repetitive. Reducing network bytes is usually very important for speeding up loading (at least it is in the boondocks of the internet - out at the rim of the world).
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chrismorgan 1618 days ago
A related thing that I realised a few days ago about compression algorithms:

  <!doctype html><meta charset=utf-8>
  <!DOCTYPE html><meta charset="utf-8">
Compress these with gzip, and the first is smaller than the second (56 and 58 bytes): lowercase doctype because you’re using very few uppercase letters in your document (on slightly larger samples it tends to save a byte or two), and omit the quotes as unnecessary. On larger documents there will be some places where you need quotes around attribute values, but it’s still worth omitting them when you can.

LZMA, similar: 60 and 63 bytes.

But then compress these with Brotli, and it’s the other way around by a larger margin, 29 and 19 bytes, because Brotli ships a dictionary primed on arbitrary web content. And so it becomes a popularity contest, and an inferior but vastly more popular technique compresses better.

In the case of #008000/green/#00ff00/#0f0/lime/#ffff00/#ff0/yellow, the dictionary doesn’t look to bee tainted, so traditional length and repetition wisdom still applies.

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ry4nolson 1618 days ago
Someone else mentioned this already but "green" is not #00ff00. Tt's #008000.
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