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.
They say that their format is open. In reality, it's them who exclusively control the definition and further evolution of the format.
That's exactly the issue. We are dependent on Google's goodwill and if they decide to scrap it or collect license fees for it we're shit out of luck.
Then projects would just not update to the new standard, pretty easy solution. Is webp even changing anymore?
And how would Google start collecting license fees? They already give away this IP, so they can't just undo that.