The Emperor’s New Rectangle
I was wondering why a dirt-simple InDesign file packaged to 6 Meg… and I discovered that the images were about 1 Meg each. I had created very simple images, colored rectangles in Illustrator CS4 and saved as straight .ai files with default settings.
Amazing, what valuable info is it persisting that makes this the right size for a primitive image? When I export as SVG I get 6 lines of code, which look verbose already, but way tiny by compare…
Does anyone remember the quote attributed to Bill Gates that PCs would never need more than 640k of memory? Poor Bill could only see the lower 2/3rds of this rectangle with the dream computer of his age. The only thing more amazing than the continuous exponential increases in memory, disk space, and bandwidth is the way such improvements are consumed by new applications the moment they are available.