Iwo Kadziela compressed a credible ASCII world map into 445 bytes using deflate compression and a 4-line JavaScript snippet.
The delivery mechanism is the real find. Kadziela pipes a base64-encoded data URI through the browser's native DecompressionStream API via fetch(), a combination most developers have never reached for. No server, no build step, no dependencies. The final output renders inside a pre tag at 0.65vw font size.
Read the original for the full breakdown of how the coordinate data was structured before compression, and why deflate-raw was the right call over other compression formats. The gap between 500 bytes as a concept and 445 bytes as a working artifact is where the actual engineering lives.
[READ ORIGINAL →]