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.
The only thing I don't like about webp is it can either be lossy or lossless, with png and jpg you know if it's lossless or not.
Unfortunately there are lots of jpegs resaved or screenshotted to png out there, so that doesn't help if you don't know the history of the file.
Heck, there are even lots such pngs with their extension changed to jpg, which you might not notice unless you check for details or your image viewer differentiates between various formats.
This whole thing has been a mystery for me for months and I couldn't I figure out where do such botched files come from, until I realised it's probably because people can't handle webps and so are making a mess of things.