what are .webp files and why has my online experience been plagued by them?
I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
You only dislike it because whatever bad app you’re using to share them on doesn’t support them.
Stop being the gullible fool and start hating the apps not the file format.
The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?
I tried it on these platforms:
APGN, WebP, AVIF. Not sure about JpegXL
GIF is size and ressource heavy
Of all the formats you mentioned these are supported on popular platforms:
That’s why gifs are still a thing.
GIF is big because it uses dictionary compression (pixel colors are mapped to a lookup table and then combinations of bits of increasing length are assigned to each table entry, the shortest combinations going for the most used colors, the longuest for the least used ones) which is great for stuff with clear (not-aliased) lines, a limited number of colors and large areas with just one flat color (such as drawings) but really bad for actual pictures (anything real world or imitating it, with natural shading).
Animation on top if it was a bit of a hack due to the header format allowing multiple images in the same file, so it’s really just a slideshow with not animation-oriented compression (i.e. each image is compressed individually and stored whole even if it’s pretty much the last image with but a handful of pixels changed), hence why it’s big when used for animation.
The kind of compression used in stuff like JPEG is based on the frequency of changes in blocks of pixels (i.e. it tries to match the image to a sum of waves of different frequencies) which is much better for natural images (but loses information as a perfect match is usually impossible) and video compression methods have all sorts of intermediate frame compression techniques the most basic of it is “this frame is the last frame with block such and such intact or moved around X pixels plus here’s a bunch of entirelly new pixels” which usually is a lot better than compressing each image individually and storing it, not taking in account previous or subsequent images.
If I remember it correctly you can’t rally beat a good dictionary encoding with wavelet compression for certain kinds of image such as drawings, cartoons and in general images with flat shading.
(Might be a bit outdated on that believe as I don’t really know what compression algorithms are used in JPEG-XL or WebP)
Further, GIF is lossless compression, so that means your drawing compressed with it will be much smaller and after decompression you still have the same image exactly, pixel by pixel.
That said, most drawings nowadays being digitally created with vector drawing apps means that an even better format is whatever native vector graphics format used by the app as that can scale to whatever size you want.
The guy clearly isn’t familiar with a lot of image formats and is trying to find out about them by asking, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in a special community called no stupid questions, no less.
You don’t need to call anyone a gullible fool and furthermore you’ve not actually helped to answer the question “what is webp”, at all. What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression? If you wanted one less “gullible fool” you’d have to answer the question and educate, at best you’ve sown confusion.
What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression?
Some people in the tech community just seem to have this weird superiority complex for some reason. They think they’re smarter than everyone else and look down on the normies, meaning they come off… Like this guy. It’s like they put all of their skill points into INT and none of them into WIS.
I feel like this answer is somewhat warranted because OP seems to have already made up their mind that it’s bad. They referred to it as a “plague” and “filthy” despite not knowing what it even is. This comes across as a lack of interest in the actual answer and more just using this post as a platform to rant about it (despite knowing nothing about it).
It’s not unreasonable to ask everyone here to word their questions politely (or at least neutrally). This is somewhat aggressive, so I think an equally aggressive answer is perfectly suitable.
Ok so I’m going to be making a lot of assumptions here but I think that OP’s language was hyperbolic and over the top because it was tongue in cheek and trying express frustration with what to them is an inexplicable roadblock to their normal web use, whilst also genuinely trying to figure out why such an obstacle would be put in place. Until they get the necessary information they’ll never see it as anything else. Looking at it that way the kind of nerd rage response devoid of the necessary context or pertinent information for the person it’s directed seemed as inappropriatenas it was counterproductive.
That said, those are just assumptions I made based on the tenor of OP’s speech and I guess you could argue I didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to his respondent. I don’t think that matters much though, it’s still utterly pointless bloviating at someone who just clearly doesn’t understand.
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