Ask HN: Best compression format for HTML?

Posted by cztomsik on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @05:27AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Is there any custom algorithm to compress HTML? I mean gzip is fast & good, bzip2 can compress even better and PAQ can do the best probably.

Is there anything specifically designed for HTML?

( 4 comments | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Best compression format for HTML? by dabmancer on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @05:37AM (#15016715)

HTML is repetitive text, and that is what conventional compression algorithms (like the ones you mentioned) are good at. How they work is pretty interesting, so I'd encourage you to go look it up.

The fact that you need to compress HTML makes me think there is a bigger problem, though (People shouldn't make complicated web pages).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Best compression format for HTML? by cztomsik on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @05:50AM (#15016771)

I know how these work and it's indeed interesting for example PAQ achieves great compression by training multiple neural networks but it's still generic so I thought maybe somebody already has pretrained something similar at large amounts of HTML so it gives really great compression even better than PAQ which has to start from scratch every time...

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Re:Ask HN: Best compression format for HTML? by zimpenfish on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @06:13AM (#15016864)

Brotli?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotli

> Brotli uses a pre-defined 120 kilobyte dictionary [...] contains over 13000 common words, phrases and other substrings derived from a large corpus of text and HTML documents.

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Re:Ask HN: Best compression format for HTML? by cztomsik on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @05:52AM (#15016780)

BTW: this is by far the best what I've read about compression http://mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html#Section_1

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