L.D. castigated:
>Oh come one now, Jake!
>
>ZBMs are small things compared to GIF & JPG. If you want to know how
>big it is *before* you expand it, you can use PKUNZIP to tell you. You
>can't *do* that with GIF or JPG or PNG AFAIK. };>
The image of a prism attached by Glenn recently was larger as ZBM than a
GIF with a reduction of color-depth appropriate to the image.
Clarence wouldn't push for ZBMs of photographic images, but such images
are _much_ smaller as JPEG with carefully selected compression, and some
twit is bound to offer them as ZBM.
I thought the idea was ZBMs would auto-explode and display. The problem
of not knowing what resources a JPG or PNG is going to swallow from cache
is an Arachne-specific problem I do not wish to have added to. A few MBs
here and there, as RAM or HDD space, is all I have to play with for the
next couple of years (violins out!).
ZBM seems to be offered as a simple alternative to a single frame Flash
file. It'd be interesting to fire up TopDraw (a good alternative to Corel
Draw 3) and do some vector drawing (the basis for Flash) and compare the
filesize with a ZBM of the screenshot.
If you don't mind, I'll continue surfing for most of the time with images
off, and avoid the potential for ZBM boobytraps :-)
Jake
.. and ninthly <g>, my original message called for the retention of
long-established courtesies among Web authors of forewarning the visitor
of any annoyance (e.g. long download) they might be about to encounter.
Off to burn a cow.
