nichoth nichoth

This week, I wrote about using the CSS @import rule to modularize CSS, and some performance challenges with that approach.

tl;dr: the issue isn't the @import rule itself, but that files under 1kb often end up the same size or even bigger when gzipped, so you get no compression benefits.

I ran a few additional tests, and wanted to share the data I found.

Current Setup

40 modular CSS files
All imported from a single kelp.css file hosted on JSDelivr

Big Time Public License

Version 2.0.2

Purpose

These terms let you use and share this software for noncommercial purposes and in small business for free, while also guaranteeing that paid licenses for big businesses will be available on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.

Acceptance

FFlate is the fastest, smallest, and most effective JavaScript compressor/decompressor currently; to create it, I used a variety of modified or optimized algorithms.

Part 1: The DEFLATE spec

The core of most popular compressed file formats is DEFLATE, or RFC1951. GZIP data, Zlib data, .zip files, PNG images, and more all use some variant of DEFLATE under the hood. At its core, the DEFLATE format is actually not too complex: it's merely a combination of Huffman coding and LZ77 compression.

If you don't understand either of these concepts, feel free to read the following subsections, or skip to Part 2 if you already know what these are and just want to get to implementation details.

Section I: Huffman Coding

Computers think of basically everything as numbers. The smallest unit of information in a computer is a single bit, which can only be either a 0 or a 1. When multiple bits are stringed together, they can be interpreted as a ba

	// @ts-check
	import puppeteer from 'puppeteer'
	import fs from 'node:fs/promises'
	import path from 'node:path'
	import { fileURLToPath } from 'node:url'
	const __filename = fileURLToPath(import.meta.url)
	const __dirname = path.dirname(__filename)
	const ANIMATION_FRAMES = 30 // 1/2 second

	const outputDir = path.join(__dirname, '..', 'screenshots')

	// @ts-check
	import puppeteer from 'puppeteer'
	import fs from 'node:fs/promises'
	import path from 'node:path'
	import { fileURLToPath } from 'node:url'
	const __filename = fileURLToPath(import.meta.url)
	const __dirname = path.dirname(__filename)

	const URL = 'https://nolaai.webflow.io/'

	import puppeteer from 'puppeteer'
	import fs from 'node:fs/promises'
	import path from 'node:path'
	import { fileURLToPath } from 'node:url'
	const __filename = fileURLToPath(import.meta.url)
	const __dirname = path.dirname(__filename)

	const URL = 'https://nolaai.webflow.io/'

	const browser = await puppeteer.launch({

	accordion-group {
	background-color: #f7f7f7;
	border-radius: 0.25em;
	display: block;
	margin-block-end: 1.5em;
	padding: 0.5em 1em;
	width: 100%;
	}

	accordion-group [accordion-trigger] {

	import * as blake3 from 'blake3';

	async function streamHash(stream:ReadableStream<Uint8Array>):Promise<string> {
	const hasher = blake3.createHash();
	const reader = stream.getReader();

	while (true) {
	const { done, value } = await reader.read();
	if (done) {
	break;

	import Database from 'better-sqlite3';
	import { createDatabaseClient } from './proxy.ts';

	// 1) Create an in-memory DB and your table(s).
	const db = new Database(':memory:');
	db.exec(`
	CREATE TABLE users (
	id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
	data JSON
	);

	var client = window.client = new WebTorrent({
	tracker: {
	rtcConfig: rtcConfig
	}
	})
	client.on('warning', onWarning)
	client.on('error', onError)

	torrent = client.add(TORRENT, onTorrent)