Why?

[nelsonic]

The Delta format https://quilljs.com/docs/delta is quite verbose:

const delta = new Delta([
  { insert: 'Gandalf', attributes: { bold: true } },
  { insert: ' the ' },
  { insert: 'Grey', attributes: { color: '#ccc' } }
]);

From the Developer perspective, having a verbose format makes perfect sense because it's easy to understand at a glance what is going on. Given that computers are more than fast enough to process this verbose format, it won't affect the performance of any app using the Delta format.

Where we feel there is scope for improvement is in:
a) data transmission i.e. saving bandwidth for people who don't have a lot of it
b) saving complete history of changes so that they can be replayed

We can minify this to:

const delta = new Delta([
  { i: 'Gandalf', a: { b: true } },
  { i: ' the ' },
  { i: 'Grey', a: { c: '#ccc' } }
]);

(157 - 117 / 157) = 25% bandwidth saving.
It might not feel like much of a saving in this trivial example, but if you scale it up to entire documents and thousands (millions?) of concurrent people using a collaborative editor,
a 25% saving on a $10k/month bandwidth bill is $30k/year! Saving bandwidth is the right thing to do for the World! Obviously this is micro-bandwidth saving is meaningless in a world where Google Stadia is server-rendering and streaming 4K games in realtime ... 🤦 But we can only try to set a good example to follow.

Todo

• List all the keywords in the Delta format e.g: insert, retain, text, attributes, etc.
• Define short versions for all the keywords e.g: i, r, t, a
  • Make the minified keywords as short as possible (that's the whole point of this project!)
  • wherever there is a keyword that starts with the same character, give priority to the keyword that appears most frequently in the format.
    e.g: insert is used more often than import so insert > i and import > im
• Create a function for converting the minified version back to the "full fat" version of Delta before passing it to a consuming library.
• Publish NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/deltamin so we can use it!
  

[nelsonic]

I scoured through the code in https://github.com/quilljs/delta/tree/master/src
and picked out all the keywords I could find.
See:

deltamin/lib/index.js

Lines 4 to 21 in ad0bda5

	const map = {
	"attributes": "a",
	"bold": "b",
	"color": "c",
	"delete": "d",
	"diff": "di",
	"image": "ig",
	"import": "im",
	"index": "in",
	"insert": "i",
	"italic": "it",
	"length": "le",
	"link": "l",
	"offset": "of",
	"ops": "o",
	"retain": "r",
	"underline": "u"
	}

If you can find other keywords to add to the list, please comment below! 🙏

[nelsonic]

🤦

[nelsonic]

Todo

• Fix the build/badge: