Using CSS for lossless image compression?

[nixnerd]

So, I’ve had this idea for awhile but I’ve never put in much leg work to see if it’s viable. I doubt that it is… but it might be.

What if someone wrote a script to convert .jpg files to pure CSS? It would essentially be a utility that would scan a photo and convert each pixel to a box shadow by appending the CSS file. It would use very succinct and minified CSS to convert the entire image.

Now, if you have an image that is say, 10 megapixels… that’s 10 million box shadows. Even if it’s compressed/minified, that’s a LOT of CSS. So, I have no idea if the file size would actually be a savings.

What are all of your thoughts on this?

[Paulie_D]

Frankly, even if the file size was equivalent….

I wonder if the rendering speed/performance would be drastically different from an image file and/or throwing 10m box shadows onto the GPU.

[nixnerd]

Yeah… see there’s another bottleneck. BUT… I feel there has to be a better way to compress images or come up with a different format altogether. Megapixel count is way out-pacing bandwidth.

This camera:

http://www.engadget.com/products/lytro/illum/

Is attacking photos from another angle and not really dealing in pixels… but rather light rays. While that is awesome, it doesn’t help us webdevs at all… as we’re still stuck with the same old file formats.

I guess I’ll just have to keep using photos that are easily compressible without much degradation.

[Author]

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