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Data Science
Simon Willison's Blog·Jul 4·5 min read
Building a World Map with only 500 bytes
TL;DR
Creating a detailed world map typically requires significant data, which can be a challenge for compact applications. Iwo Kadziela developed a method to generate a credible ASCII world map using only 445 bytes of data through deflate compression and JavaScript.
✦ Why It Matters
Engineers can apply deflate compression techniques to optimize data usage in applications.
Key Takeaways
- Experiment with deflate compression for data efficiency.
- Utilize fetch() with data URIs in your projects.
- Consider ASCII art for lightweight visualizations.
- Explore minimal data representation techniques in web development.
How It Works
The method uses deflate compression to minimize the size of the ASCII world map data. By encoding the map as a base64 string, it can be fetched directly in JavaScript.
The fetch() function retrieves this data, which is then decompressed using a DecompressionStream. Finally, the decompressed text is displayed in a preformatted HTML element, allowing for a clear representation of the map.