On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:55 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@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