A Genetic approach to CSS compression
Dev tools
css compression
SHOW HN2012
How HN took it
2 positive, 3 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 1 critical, out of 6 comments about the project. Thread score +0.07.
Idea: 2 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Interesting experiment despite being a dead end
From 2 comments
I really appreciate OP's honesty/humility, and (presuming you're right franze) it shows that even things we ourselves consider to be dead-ends, may in fact be useful to different…
justinsb on HNQuite interesting though, as far as "useless" ideas go.
halbermensch on HN
Could be useful for mobile devices with small caches
From 1 comment
I was not aware of that at all, thanks for pointing it out. Looks like this could actually be a solution to something.
friggeri on HN
Objections
Gzipped output is larger than plain minification
From 1 comment
``` however, although the resulting file size is smaller, once gzipped it actually leads to larger files than by only using minification, therefore this is a totally useless…
franze on HN
Genetic algorithms are heuristics with no optimality guarantee
From 1 comment
The problem might be NP-hard, but with modern commercial (CPLEX, Gurobi, Xpress) and open-source (Cbc, SCIP) solvers for discrete optimization you can find a provably optimal…
merraksh on HN
Non-deterministic, unclear how many generations to run
From 1 comment
Since GA is non-deterministic, you will never know how long / for how many iterations ( generations) to run the GA for. If one could get a pretty good compression in around…
ganarajpr on HN
Requests
Use compressed file size as the fitness function
From 1 comment
What about if you rerun the genetic algorithm with the fitness function being the size of the final compressed+gzipped file? Maybe that could counter-intuitively reorder the CSS…
muxxa on HN
Try exact discrete optimization solvers instead
From 1 comment
The problem might be NP-hard, but with modern commercial (CPLEX, Gurobi, Xpress) and open-source (Cbc, SCIP) solvers for discrete optimization you can find a provably optimal…
merraksh on HN
Questions
Is gzip served on the fly or precompressed as best practice?
From 3 comments
Best practice for serving .css files is gzippped? Is this at the file level or on-the-fly by the web server? In any case, why is this considered best practice? (I ask as a…
SageRaven on HNGenerally on-the-fly by the web server, although you can, in theory, zip manually and serve. The big speed bottleneck when serving pages is the network so the smaller the file…
sambeau on HNWhile most people do on-the-fly gzipping, I think that's it's best to just include static gzipping as part of the deployment process. Then you can use e.g. Nginx's…
icebraining on HN
Alternatives named
Exact solvers such as CPLEX, Gurobi, Cbc and SCIP
From 1 comment
The problem might be NP-hard, but with modern commercial (CPLEX, Gurobi, Xpress) and open-source (Cbc, SCIP) solvers for discrete optimization you can find a provably optimal…
merraksh on HN