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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

That's a case of not solving the problem.

Leaving aside the need to send a massive set of screen images for the moment, a severe issue with that protocol is the lack of compression. It doesn't need to use a quadtree[1], although that will significantly speed up the interface when sliding the tree depth to the screen action being taken. Even RLE[2], Huffman[3], or any other standard string compression[4][5] would solve this issue shown in the blog.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree#Compressed_quadtrees

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression#Image

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression#General_p...

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Efficient data handling is better than spending cycles on generating a lot of backslashes and then burn cycles on compressing it.

It's also good to properly manage transmission of that list of screens, even after you've fixed the backslashes. The article stated that they degraded the user experience by artificially limiting the string length instead of fixing the issue.

As an immediate stopgap before the proper fix was in place.

"Screens" is referring to the state of a multi-step UI (similar to the back/forward cache in a browser), not a bitmapped image.

Yes. In what way does that mean that the transmission size should not be compressed? Bitmapped images are not the only data structure whose size will shrink by removing redundancy.

I think you're being downvoted because you've claimed "That's a case of not solving the problem.", but I think that actually better describes this answer. It's clever, certainly, but misses the fact that the stack of screens was never intended to be recursively escaped and changing the form that it took was the real fix rather than rubbing some compression sauce on what was never intended to be lots of backslashes in the first place. And indeed, that's what the author did: they shipped a bandaid fix while working on a more comprehensive fix, one which didn't require RLE or a quadtree (!).

You're describing the desire to avoid protocol compression when transmitting data that grows without bound. That has nothing to do with fixing the backslashes. The problem isn't backslashes. Those are just a symptom of data that can have any length.

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