less caps plz

There are some things online that chew up enormous amounts of data, and therefore energy.

Crypto and A.I. are recent culprits, but also things like auto-playing video, uncompressed images, and unused code probably exist on just about every website ever.

Then there’s the little stuff.

This is probably the most uber nerdo article I’ve ever read all the way to the end, not because I think I’ll ever use the info in here…

Just coz it was fun to read.

It’s all about how using all lowercase letters instead of initial-caps, or sentence case, can reduce the size of pages by using data compression.

My non-techo summary: When a sentence has letters that repeat more than once, the compression algorithm can say “the letter d appears 6 times” and write some code to that effect, which is less than the code to write out 6 ds. If a capital D appears, that’s an extra whole chunk of code, so by making the uppercase D a lowercase d, the algorithm can just say “d” appears 7 times instead of 6, removing the need for the “D” code.

The article explains it way better. It’s a cool thing with examples that are easy to follow even if you’re not a coder.

Sometimes we need to do the hard work of reducing our footprint… Other times, I think it’s nice to just enjoy watching someone experiment with stuff.