Data compression and image compression is a great way to improve the overall internet, bandwidth and speed. Maybe as important as new protocols like SPDY and js/css minification and cdn hosting of common libraries.
As long as ISPs/telcos don't go back to the days of AOL network wide compression to reduce bandwidth beyond low quality I am for this at service level like facebook/dropbox uploads. I hope this inspires more in this area. Games also get better with better textures in less space.
Still to this day, I am amazed at the small file sizes macromedia (adobe now) was able to obtain with flash/swf/asf even high quality PNGs would compress. So yes we all have lots of bandwidth now but crunching to the point of representing the same thing is a good thing. With cable company caps and other bandwidth false supply shortage that focus might resurge a bit.
SWF has a very cleverly designed binary vector graphics format, which naturally lends itself to small filesizes. Much better than SVG or (E)PS, I think.
To quote from the format spec, "SWF uses techniques such as bit-packing and structures with optional fields to minimize file size." Many fields are variable-width numbers of bits, using only as many bits as necessary to encode the data. Coordinates are delta-encoded.
As long as ISPs/telcos don't go back to the days of AOL network wide compression to reduce bandwidth beyond low quality I am for this at service level like facebook/dropbox uploads. I hope this inspires more in this area. Games also get better with better textures in less space.
Still to this day, I am amazed at the small file sizes macromedia (adobe now) was able to obtain with flash/swf/asf even high quality PNGs would compress. So yes we all have lots of bandwidth now but crunching to the point of representing the same thing is a good thing. With cable company caps and other bandwidth false supply shortage that focus might resurge a bit.