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WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

eng.aurelienpierre.com

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Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#101

Post by RheingoldRiver »

laserbeam wrote: post #6

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

This site made me add my first-ever global Stylus sheet:

* { font-variant-ligatures:unset!important; }

I'm pretty infuriated that this is necessary, why would someone abuse readability so much for their own personal satisfaction about how "cool and unique" they are? Usability. Comes. First.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#102

Post by Beijinger »

iainmerrick wrote: post #85
Beijinger wrote: post #62

The author may be right but he definitely does not understand the difference between good and good enough.

Is it really unreasonable for a photographer to have a higher standard of "good enough"? Anyway, his point is that JPEG was already "good enough", and WebP is not actually "good" for his purposes despite claims that it's better than JPEG for all purposes.

His claim is too broad. Why not serve RAW files? For the real enthusiasts

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#104

Post by rob74 »

laserbeam wrote: post #6

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

Yeah, that got on my nerves too. Ligatures (like kerning) are supposed to help make reading more fluent and otherwise blend in, not stand out like a sore thumb. Really not sure what those ligatures are supposed to say - "wow, look how cool this font is, it has ligatures!!!"?!

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#105

Post by alpaca128 »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #25
j1elo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?

It's how English was written in the "olden times". At that time, little flairs (such as ligatures) were pretty common, and were very fanciful. Some simpler ligatures (like ff) survive today, but embellished ones (like ct) were toned down. It's just a stylistic choice to draw them one way or another, but it's jarring to see the fancier ones in "modern" texts because we're used to the simpler styles. Fun fact: The Germ…

To me it just feels out of place, like a calligraphy ligature got accidentally mixed with a standard serif font. From what I've seen this kind of ligature is usually applied to many other letter combinations as well, in which case it at least looks consistent.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#106

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

rsp1984 wrote: post #24

This seems to be in the same spirit as audiophiles claiming they can hear the difference between various speaker cables, or the "hints of dark chocolate" in wine tasting. Personally I see zero differences in the images on that page and unless the author has some really super-human vision abilities (possible! but unlikely) my guess is he doesn't either. WebP looks perfectly fine to me.

To me the banding in the "lossless" (do words mean nothing anymore !?) webp pictures is super clear and looks like how I'd expect low quality JPEGs to look.

It's the same kind of artifact that makes certain movies look terrible over netflix, those that have large dark blank spaces. Maybe you shouldn't look to closely because once you see it, it'll ruin your enjoyment of certain compressed media forever.

And by the way I don't think the comparison with audiophile equipment is fair. In the audiophile case we are talking about using very similar output hardware to output what is effectively the same signal. Here we have huge differences in file size (35% and more between JPEG and WEBP, a lot more than that for true lossless), and taking diffs between them shows very much that the signal isn't the same.

There is a compression limit under which you can see it's compressed, right?

https://vole.wtf/kilogram/

So it makes sense that there is some threshold sensitivity where a picture starts appearing "lossless". That threshold is going to be different from device to device and person to person.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#107

Post by JimDabell »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #25
j1elo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?

It's how English was written in the "olden times". At that time, little flairs (such as ligatures) were pretty common, and were very fanciful. Some simpler ligatures (like ff) survive today, but embellished ones (like ct) were toned down. It's just a stylistic choice to draw them one way or another, but it's jarring to see the fancier ones in "modern" texts because we're used to the simpler styles. Fun fact: The Germ…

The same goes for the ampersand – “et” slowly morphed into “&”.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#108

Post by jakubmazanec »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #101
laserbeam wrote: post #6

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

This site made me add my first-ever global Stylus sheet: * { font-variant-ligatures:unset!important; } I'm pretty infuriated that this is necessary, why would someone abuse readability so much for their own personal satisfaction about how "cool and unique" they are? Usability. Comes. First.

I wouldn't turn off all ligatures, some of them are actually useful.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#109

Post by eviks »

arp242 wrote: post #64
londons_explore wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Image decode is a rather tiny fraction of the loading time of a modern web page, or its power budget... Thats why, to my knowledge, nobody even bothers to use hardware jpeg encoders/decoders on phones/laptops, despite many bits of silicon having them.

JPEG may be fast enough for all of that, but is that also true for these newer ones? Decoding the .heic pictures from my old iPhone takes 1-2 seconds on my laptop(!!) As near as I could find out that's because the iPhones and macBooks and such all have hardware support for that, and my ThinkPad doesn't.

According to the article I've linked above, JXL has twice as many points (don't remember actual speed comparison numbers) in the decoding speed comparison, and is also more parallelizable

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#110

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

kome wrote: post #57

Clearly, from reading the comments here, most people don't see any difference. However, the argument still stands, and perhaps - precisely because of the comments here - it becomes even stronger: there is no point in using WebP.

The article is talking specifically about portfolio pictures for photographers. I that case, it doesn't matter what most people see, it matters what the person hiring you sees. And if you are doing commercial product photography, the person hiring you is probably going to be an art director who has spent many days messing about with pictures to get smooth background on websites and in print.
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