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sltkr 2 days ago

If you compress the HTML, which you want to do anyway for HTML/CSS if you care about file sizes, then most of the base64 overhead goes away:

    $ head -c 1000000 /dev/urandom | base64 -w0 | gzip | wc -c
    1009042

    $ head -c 1000000 /dev/urandom | base64 -w0 | zstd | wc -c
    1000300
So gzipped base64 can add less than 1% overhead. Of course a binary format can be even more efficient (also when decoding, I imagine) but the question is if the difference is big enough to introduce an entirely new format when base64 data URIs are already widely supported.

Then the other question is why this proposed packed format is better than the dozen already existing formats like Web Archive, CHM, MAFF, MHTML, etc.