On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:55 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Stephen Bain
<stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The obvious next step would be to get Mexico to
make their flag less
complicated.
Yes, but that can still only get you so far. The SVG version of
Libya's flag on Wikimedia is 286 bytes, but I can make an equally
scalable GIF that's just 35 bytes. :P
No you can't.
The GIF is only 'equally scalable' if you make certain (bad)
assumptions about how it should be scaled which may be valid for that
image but which would be completely wrong for most others.
Regardless: It's an utterly silly discussion: Except for users on
unusually slow network connections located fairly close to Wikimedia
clusters (and I mean substantially sub-dialup) load times will be the
same* for all objects under ~4kbytes because they are latency bound
and because of how TCP initial window sizing works. Likewise, on disk
most file systems do not do sub-blocksize allocations.
*http://www.nedworks.org/~mark/tmp/minresponse-realworld2-rtt.png