cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898

Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user’s needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90’s, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn’t teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

  • macnielEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    Webp… For web pictures. Then why are there webp files on my non web harddrives? Give me PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIFs. Not this ugly Google shit. I never liked it in the first place. And take your shitty webm with you.

    • @ryannathansEnglish
      9•1 year ago

      They are smaller and higher quality, why use archaeic formats?

      • macnielEnglish
        -2•1 year ago

        Who needs smaller files? We have compressed data streams since ever. Also we use “archaic” formats because the web is built on backwards compatibility.

        Also higher quality? You can’t get higher than lossless (PNG, TIFF) anyway. And JPEGs are good enough for photos. Also you know what kind of picture you have by it’s minetype or file extension. With webp? Well it’s a box of chocolate.

        • @QuaternionsRockEnglish
          7•1 year ago

          While I agree that unique file extensions for each image category are very convenient, this is overall an absurd take.

          You can’t get higher than lossless (PNG, TIFF) anyway

          PNGs have horrendous compression. Like, it’s notorious for that.

          And JPEGs are good enough for photos.

          This is just wrong. Modern formats have astonishingly better reproduction, especially for images of things like text. Some formats are also designed to mitigate artifacts caused by re-saving. No more “too much JPEG”.

          All that being said, I don’t think WebP is the answer. JPEG-XL is better in so many ways, and if we’re going to make a switch, it should be to a format that is definitively the best option.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Webp… For web pictures. Then why are there webp files on my non web harddrives? Give me PNG

      You know what the N in PNG stands for?