[reubano]

I still don't get why they use images

    <td class="bb pad04 top center" style="width: 32px">
      <img src="/images/status0.gif">
    </td>

Instead of unicode:https://www.htmlsymbols.xyz/unicode/U%2b2705

[cure]

It's because they can host the images in S3 buckets, so that their status page goes down when S3 is down.

/s

But, this really happened in 2017.

[jermaustin1]

if the image tag is drawn dynamically then it is actually probably less bandwidth than the unicode character since the image can be cached at multiple locations including the browser.

[jrochkind1]

Less bandwidth than the 1-4 bytes of a codepoint in UTF-8? How do you figure?

[cure]

.... no way.

Cache freshness checks involve a lot of headers, which take up way more bandwidth than one unicode character.